Assignment In Utopia

THE TEXT IS FLY
WITHIN THE BOOK

ONLY

L99as

cop 5

Keep Y our Card in This Pocket

Books will be issued only on presentation of proper
library cards.

Unless labeled otherwise, books may be retained
tor two weeks. Borrowers finding books marked de-
faced or mutilated are expected to report same at
library desk; otherwise the last borrower will be held
responsible for all imperfections discovered.

The card holder is responsible for all books drawn
on this card.

Penalty for over-due books 2c a day plus cost of
notices.

Lost cards and change of residence must be re-
ported promptly.

Public Library

Kansas City, Mo.

TENSION ENVELOPE CORP.

0 0001 014012^ a

MTTOBkaw'V •

tc..c„Ki. pulll Ll FEB 2 8 1972

ASSIGNMENT IN UTOPIA

BY EUGENE LYONS

THE LIFE AND DEATH
OF SACCO AND VANZETTI

MOSCOW CARROUSEL

SIX SOVIET PLAYS (ed.)

WE COVER THE WORLD (ed.)

ASSIGNMENT
IN UTOPIA

Eugene Lyons

Harcourt, Brace and Company • New York

COPYRIGHT, 1937, BY

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

All rights reserved, including
the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form.

Ninth printing, December, 1938

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC-, RAHWAY, N.
Typography by Robert Josephy

To Billy and Genie

Contents

book i. Prelude to Moscow

i. Revolt Against Ugliness 3

ii. The Clowning Called Justice 12

hi. On the Eve of Fascism 21

iv. I Defend Sacco and Vanzetti 29

v. Working for the Soviets 37

book 2. Hallelujah !

I. Moscow and Muscovites 53

II. The Kremlin’s Guests and Poor Relations 66

hi. Nep: Burlesque on Capitalism 81

iv. Hallelu j ah ! 93

v. Censorship 105

vi. Demonstration Trial 114

vii. Journey Through Russia 134

vm. Iron Monolith 147

ix. Savor of Life 157

x. Life is Rationed 170

xi. Social Slag 183

xn. The Great “Break” 196

xiii. Accent of Moscow 212

xiv. Picnicking in a Graveyard 226

xv. Two Plus Two Equals Five 240

xvi. The War Nobody Knew 250

vii

viii

CONTENTS

book 3. Doubt

1*

Stalin Launches a Slogan

263

11.

The Peasants Are Conquered

279

hi.

We Move to a Mansion

293

IV.

Locomotives Come to Central Asia

304

V.

Search for the “Real Russia”

320

VI.

Bargains in Ideals and Omelettes

328

VII.

Revolt Against Intelligence

341

VIII.

. Forty-eight Ghosts

349

IX.

Rasstrelf

362

X.

“Death to Wreckers!”

370

XI.

An Interview with Stalin

381

XII.

American Interlude

393

book 4. Disillusionment

1. “Socialism” Revised

ix. Bernard Shaw in Moscow

hi. Ambulance and Motor-Cars

iv. Gold Mining in Torture Chambers

v. Culture in a Strait jacket

vi. Fog of Skepticism over Russia
vn. Planned Chaos

viii. The End of RAPP

ix. Living Space

x. American Tragedies

xi. Persian Entr’acte

xii. Upon Sodom and Gomorrah Brimstone and Fire

xiii. Did the First Five Year Plan Succeed?

xiv. Britishers on Trial

xv. The Press Corps Conceals a Famine

xvi. Forebodings

413

428

43 ^

447

465

474

482

494

503

5i9

53i

540

552

561

572

581

CONTENTS

XX

book 5. Re dedication

i„ My Recall from Moscow

591

11. Farewell to Russia!

600

hi. A Tour of Tyrannies

610

iv. To Tell or Not to Tell

624

v. Adventure in Idealism

637

Index

649

BOOK I

PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

I. Revolt Against Ugliness

IN AMERICA we still romanticize the glories of a hard, pov-
erty-ridden youth. Our rags-to-riches legends and literature over-
look the fact that Tony the Bootblack ends up as a hod-carrier
or a gangster more often than a millionaire. They overlook the
more vital fact that when he does achieve wealth he generally
carries the scars of the unequal struggle on his mind and spirit
forever. He can rarely attain the mellow quality of the full, cul-
tured existence of those whose rise was more orderly, less des-
perate. Our up-from-the-gutter type of true, or nearly true, story
is written by the few who did creep out of the quagmires of want
and its endless degradations. The many who were swallowed up,
or who emerged broken in body and spirit, do not write auto-
biographies or make after-dinner speeches.

On the East Side of New York, where I grew up, we knew
hardship and fear in their less romantic guises. Our streets teemed
with crowded, chaotic life like the underside of a moss-grown
stone. Our tenements were odoriferous garbage heaps where the
same over-abundant life proliferated. We knew coarseness, ver-
min, want, so intimately that they became routine commonplaces.
The affluence, the ease, the glimpse of ordered beauty were dis-
tant and unreal, like stories in books. Only the ugliness and sweat
and unrelenting tussle were close and terribly familiar.

The idealization of poverty as “the university of hard knocks”
seemed to me insult added to injury as early as I was able to
think at all. The be-furred ladies who came into the social settle-
ments of our slums to assure us patronizingly of the blessings we
were enjoying infuriated me. They fascinated me too, with sug-
gestions of incredible far-off splendors in their sleekness.

I was presiding at a Boy Scout meeting at the Educational
Alliance one evening when just such a lady, trailing clouds of
radiance from her up-town world, came into the room. Her in-
trusion offended some vague sense of fitness in me, so that when

3

4 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

she asked me an innocent question I ordered her sharply not to
interrupt our meeting. The reward of my impertinence was an
invitation, several days later, to call on her at a West End Ave-
nue address. I had never seen such elegance at close range (though
it was only an ordinary apartment), and passed through the inter-
view in numb bewilderment. I remember the softness of the rugs,
like lush grass, and the loveliness of a little boy who called my
hostess “mother” — the word “mother” somehow did not jibe in
my experience with glossy, care-free, nicely-upholstered women;
it had always meant harassed, overworked and slovenly women.
But what I carried away chiefly was a burning humiliation because
the lining of the overcoat I gave up to the valet was in tatters.
In my confusion, when I retrieved the coat, I slipped my arm
into the torn lining instead of the sleeve, and the glamorous lady
herself helped me to extricate myself. The shame of it rankled
for months.

Poverty was only half of our routine ordeal. The other half
was an acute awareness of being aliens and intruders in a nation
of Americans. Between the world of our text-books and movies
and newspapers and the other world of our homes and parents
there was a deep gulf: different interests, preoccupations, ideals,
languages. On the threshhold of your home you removed your
American self like an overcoat, and you put it on once more when
you left home. We lived this double existence so continuously
that the idea of an integrated life, in which home and out-of-
home activities were part of the same pattern, was beyond our
imagination.

The school principal, Dr. Kottman, talked casually in my hear-
ing one day about playing baseball with his son. The implication
of a father who talked the same language and played the same
games as his son, I can still recall, struck me as bizarre.

No American with deep roots in the American soil can under-
stand the nostalgic homelessness of immigrant children, the pathos
of second-generation aliens. Land where our fathers died , land
of the Pilgrims’ fride — sung in the assembly hall by several thou-
sand Jewish, Russian, Italian, other foreign boys and girls whose
fathers had never heard of the Pilgrims. We were “Americanized”
about as gently as horses are broken in. In the whole crude process,
we sensed a disrespect for the alien traditions in our homes and

REVOLT AGAINST UGLINESS 5

came unconsciously to resent and despise those traditions, good
and bad alike, because they seemed insuperable barriers between
ourselves and the adopted land.

We were caught and tangled in a mass of people for the most
part resigned to their fate, sodden with hopelessness, and in a
stupor of physical exhaustion. For the average boy it was easier
to burrow deeper into the heap, taking the aroma and the drab-
ness of the East Side into his soul, than to attempt the Gargan-
tuan job of escaping. The Americanism that he acquired and
dragged into the writhing heap was the loud, vulgar, surface — the
slang, the sporting page, the crude success ideals of the movies
and yellow journals — and nothing of the grandeur at the core
of America.

But when the urge to escape does enter into the blood of a
slum denizen, it is a feverish thing that drives him with whips
of fire. “Success” is never a pale beckoning star. It is a flaming
ball that blots out nearly everything else in the boy’s firmament.
Elsewhere it may be mere self-fulfillment. On our East Side it
was that and more — a species of defiance and revenge against the
clinging squalors and the smugness of the lucky ones and, above
all, against the social system that breeds such plague spots.

Whatever the expression of that pitiless ambition, it is always
shot through with hatred for the status quo. Sometimes it is openly
defiant of restraints and carries the jungle law of dog-eat-dog
competition to its logical conclusion in crime, gangsterism. At other
times, the predatory technique is kept within the safer bounds of
legality. Whether the exceptional boy revolting against putrescent
surroundings turns into an unprincipled criminal or an unprin-
cipled businessman is often simply a question of the proportions
of courage and cleverness in his make-up.

And occasionally, as in my own case, the clamoring protest
transcends the personal. The driving ambition widens out to em-
brace all the disinherited and exploited. It becomes a conscious
protest against ugliness and injustice as such, and embraces pas-
sionately whatever formula of social revolt is closest to hand.
There Is a vast and unbridgeable difference between the radicalism
that is accepted at second-hand, from the outside, through the
mind, and the revolt that is nurtured in one’s very bones. Those
of us who were — or thought ourselves — “socialists” instinctively,

6 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

through spontaneous hatred for the reality as we savored it, could
never quite get over a certain distrust of “converts” to the cause
from other social strata.

2

I thought myself a “socialist” almost as soon as I thought at
all and years before I had heard of the Communist Manifesto.
Congressman Meyer London, the shrill personification of the
East Side yearning for Justice, loomed much larger on my hori-
zon than Karl Marx. Long before I learned the standardized
proofs that capitalism is doomed, I knew for a certainty that the
whole world was one battle ground, contested between fat-bellied
Capitalists and downtrodden Workers, and that victory for the
Workers, for my side, was inevitable. The coming triumph was
at most a matter of chronology, and life’s one duty was to bring
the date nearer. The class struggle was not an academic formula
or a political slogan. It seemed to me as real as my friends and
school and the burden of the monthly rent and gas bills. It was
something much too obvious to need explaining or defending, let
alone proving.

My memory can conjure up no one moment of thunderous illu-
mination when the rightness and certainty of the socialist future
of eternal justice and equality were revealed to me. In our multi-
farious world of dreams and ugliness, a boy soaked up a social
faith, if he was built that way, as naturally and imperceptibly as
his schoolmates and blockmates soaked up the tough-guy philos-
ophy or the success-at-any-price philosophy. By a sort of social
osmosis.

As a child, down in a stinking steerage hole full of vermin and
vomit, in one of the foul ships which, at that time, dumped car-
goes of bewildered immigrants on the American shores, I treas-
ured a vision of the fairyland called America. I shut my eyes
and 'saw it clearly — the glittering streets, the happy faces, the
new shiny land stocked with beauty. That lovely vision broke
sickeningly on the garbage cans of the Corlears Hook section of
New York. The specters of “slack” seasons, of strikes for a living
wage, of illness that cut off all earnings for a large family — the
sight of my father’s cadaverous face after a long day at the
machine (it was a curiously handsome and sensitive face under

REVOLT AGAINST UGLINESS J

the mask of bottomless fatigue)— these were less horrible when
viewed as aspects of the perpetual class hostilities and as prelude
to an ineffable triumph.

Our ant-heap was infested with street gangs. But I found my-
self somehow enrolled in a “Socialist Sunday School” on East
Broadway, run by the Workmen’s Circle. The hymns we chanted
were Arise, ye prisoners of starvation , Arise , ye wretched l. of the
earth! } and The peopled flag is deepest red . One May Day I
stood on a platform and recited a lugubrious poem about a beggar
boy which began:

Alone in the cold and dreary street,

With my torn old clothes and bare cold feet.

Among those who heard me was a beautiful child of seven,
with curls to her shoulders. I was all of thirteen, with the weight
of suffering humanity on my thin shoulders and a volume of
Dostoievsky under my arm. Ten years later this girl became my
wife. Twenty-four years later, because the sad rhymes about the
beggar boy had become a tradition in the family, our daughter
made me recite them in the inappropriate setting of the Ethical
Culture School.

From the Socialist Sunday School I graduated naturally into
the “Yipsels,” the Young People’s Socialist League, where we
debated weighty questions and took courses in Marx and Spencer
and distributed leaflets for socialist candidates without the slightest
hope of their election.

The highest reach of anxious parental hope in homes like mine
was to turn sons into doctors and lawyers and to marry off daugh-
ters to doctors and lawyers. In affectionate moments, proud rela-
tives, impressed by my seriousness and report cards, tried the pre-
fix “Dr.” before my name, and, miraculously, it always fitted
nicely. The sacrifice involved in sending me to high school, and
then to college, rather than into the factory, practically made my
eventual emergence as a physician or lawyer a duty — a very oner-
ous duty. The fact that neither calling stirred me to enthusiasm
made me feel a good deal of an ingrate towards my parents and
towards my elder brother, who, since the age of thirteen, had
been among the sweated legions bending over sewing machines.
But I had no stomach for the professional respectability to which

8 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

they aspired for me. Ostensibly I was being primed for the law.
But my dreams were of writing, not as a means of making a living,
but as a weapon on my side of the class war.

My parents’ sacrifices consisted in dispensing with my potential
contribution to the family income and in providing me with food,
clothing and shelter. But it could not easily be extended to in-
clude bugaboo items of carfares and occasional expenses. By work-
ing after school hours, I managed to earn these myself. At one
tragic juncture, internal politics ousted me from a night job at
the Educational Alliance and the lack of a single dollar a week
threatened to cut short my high school career. That sum, ad-
vanced for ten weeks running by Adolph Nash, my Scoutmaster,
helped a little to patch up the faith in social work which the ouster
had shattered.

By the end of the ten weeks, I was earning three dollars a
week as “assistant professor” to a teacher of English in the hurry-
up preparatory schools for adults. My function was chiefly the
correction of examination papers on literary subjects about which
I knew precisely nothing. One night I would remain up, hur-
riedly digesting As You Like It in preparation for a set of test
papers j another night it might be Hamlet or Silas Marner . This
“professorship” I retained for two or three years, despite pro-
found ignorance of the subjects my employer taught and even
deeper ignorance of certain alarming predilections on his part
which he described as “hedonism.” I looked up the word in dic-
tionaries and warded off his occasional experimental sallies in my
direction (luckily his hedonism was not insistent) but I did not
understand what it was all about until many years later. This
brand of hedonism was one of the few weeds that did not find
root in our slum soil.

3

The Russian revolution, in March, 1917, was, for most of the
boys in my college freshman classes, just one more headline in a
time replete with startling news. For a few of us, it was the rap-
turous harbinger of that Great Change in the glow of which we
had warmed our spirits. Kerensky, Lvov, Miliukov, fraternization
between Russian and German soldiers, the rise of Soviets — great
names and great events, amidst the fumes of inspired rhetoric.

REVOLT AGAINST UGLINESS 9

Even the confusion was heart-warming, because it sparkled with
words and phrases learned in the socialist Sunday schools, shouted
in the Meyer London campaigns, debated in the Yipsel circles.
Our intimate, esoteric language suddenly holding the center of
the world stage! The exultant realization that our thinking and
dreaming had become history so soon! We hummed the new
Russian Hymn to Freedom and we hummed the International at
socialist lectures and dances, blissfully unaware that the two melo-
dies were locked in life-and-death combat.

Then came yet greater names and greater events: Lenin, Trot-
sky, Zinoviev, Smolny Institute, the battleship Aurora , the sur-
render of the Winter Palace. The Bolshevik seizure of power in
the name of the Soviets seemed confirmation of the new era born
eight months before. We envied the men and women who lived
and fought within the circles of light shed by the heroes of the
triumphant class war. We decked the revolution in the opalescent
raiment of our visions. A Fatherland at last, and a focus for our
hopes!

Our New York lives seemed hatefully prosaic by contrast with
the poetry of victorious revolution. The draft . . . slackers . . .
Liberty Bonds . . . Liberty cabbage. . . . Give until it hurts.
. . . Good-by , Broadway , hello y France . ... It all seemed a
stupid burlesque in the blinding light of events in Russia. Stupid-
est of all were the college classes, the marching and saluting and
bayonet drills of the Students Army Training Corps into which
we had been herded.

For some of us Armistice, for all the hysteria and noise, was
an anti-climax, because there had been Brest-Litovsk.

Soon after I was demobilized and presented with an honorable
discharge, I heard Norman Thomas speak. I can recall neither the
occasion of the meeting nor what he said, but only my inner ex-
citement. I carried away the revelation that the Russian revolution
had no boundaries, since it was the initial stage of the world revo-
lution. The fight against capitalists in America, the battle to restore
freedom to political prisoners and conscientious objectors, were
just part of the world- wide defense of the Russian revolution.
I am not certain that Thomas said these things. More likely they
were my private deductions from the fervor with which he de-
picted the capitalist injustice around us.

10

PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

On the very day when I removed my army uniform, I wrote
my first publicity story for the Workers Defense Union, organized
by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, with offices at the Rand School. Day
after day, I composed these stories, destined for the New York
Call and other radical publications, recounting the sufferings of
I.W.W.’s and other political prisoners, the depredations of the
Department of Justice on a rampage, the havoc being wrought by
the American Legion. It was a time of raids on radicals, “Treat-
’em-rough!” hooliganism, and mass deportations. Tales of horror
poured in upon our Workers Defense Union.

Our work seemed to me an intrinsic, inseparable part of the
civil wars being fought out then in the land of the Soviets. It was
all part of the Russian revolution and was, despite the cruelty and
the suffering, curiously exhilarating — like the exhilaration of war.
And when I left my parents’ home in Brooklyn for a shabby fur-
nished room on lower Second Avenue, that, too, seemed part of
the imminent world revolution. Society and I were coming of
age at the same time! The world was casting off its capitalist
shackles and I was casting off the shackles of home and school at
the same time. The coincidence, of course, was a marvel of mar-
vels, even if no one realized the mystic significance of that con-
juncture of events except myself. The thrill of seeing my name
in print, secretly cherished, was no selfish indulgence as with some
of my literary friends, since my writing was for the cause. Such
is the towering egotism of youth, even in its most altruistic poses.

There was that May Day in 1919, a day of blood and terror
and the excruciating pain, of helpless anger. Workers’ parades
were smashed, radicals were brutally mauled, jails were crowded.
The telephone rang continuously to apprise us of more raids, more
brutality, more arrests. Late that afternoon the patriotic marauders
swarmed through the Rand School, clambering up fire-escapes. A
metal workers’ union shared our offices. I can still see the burly
workman with an iron weight in his hairy fist waiting tensely at
the door for the first Legionnaire who forced it open. Only the
accident that they overlooked our room prevented another serious
casualty.

Yet that appalling day was touched with rapture. We felt our-
selves in the thick of a great struggle for Justice, only a few of

REVOLT AGAINST UGLINESS I 1

us, but pitting our faith against something monstrous. We had
just emerged from another battle and the lull was sweet.

There was a separate rapture for me. The others in the office
may have been aware of her — “Little Sunshine,” one of the men
nicknamed her. But in my eyes she was the loveliest thing ever
created. She came to the office that evening in a middy blouse
and a red tarn, and she remembered how I had recited Nobody’s
Child centuries ago. She was now nearly fifteen, radiant and elec-
trically vivacious, and picked out on the typewriter words more
wonderful than anything Shakespeare or Goethe had ever put
together:

“Dear Comrade Eugene: I Uke you . Do you Uke me ? Yours
truly y Billy ”

II. The Clowning Called Justice

THE next two years were so full, so rich, so tight-packed with
sharp impressions and enthusiasms that they seem in retrospect a
whole lifetime. I worked briefly on several newspapers, among
them the Erie, Pa., Dispatch, and Financial America on Wall
Street, and wrote copy for some months in the publicity depart-
ments of two motion picture companies. I succeeded in getting sev-
eral high-pitched effusions into arty little magazines. I became
habituated to the thrill of my name in print. These things, how-
ever, were secondary. First place belonged to the exciting friend-
ships and activities in the radical movement.

There was Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the most brilliant woman
I had ever met. A veteran of the front trenches in the labor strug-
gle since fifteen, she was, at thirty, attractive, winsomely Irish
in her wit and her savor of life, with a remarkably cool intelli-
gence behind her fiery oratory and personality. In the Mesaba
Range strike, the Paterson and Lawrence strikes, her eloquence
and courage and sweetness had won her tens of thousands of
worshipful friends among the workers. And there was Carlo
Tresca, big, bearded, boastful, life-loving, and as unlike the em-
bittered anarchist of popular tradition as possible. Priest-baiting
and spaghetti were among his chief passions, and his hairbreadth
escapes from enemy bullets everywhere from Abruzzi to the cop-
per empire of Montana were ample proof of his charmed life.
And Fred Biedenkapp, the most Latin and temperamental Ger-
man that ever lived. And the soft-spoken Vincent St. John — “the
Saint” to “Wobbly” fellow- workers — full of mature class-war wis-
dom, tales of prospecting for gold, and off-color stories. He was
a compact little man who conveyed a sense of immense concen-
trated strength in reserve — the kind of man who needed only a
first-rate revolution to win him immortality. And scores of other
I.W.W.’s, anarchists, socialists, American lumberj'acks, Jewish
clothing workers, Russian intellectuals, Italian terrorists, Hindu

12

THE CLOWNING CALLED JUSTICE I 3

nationalists- — even liberals with creases in their pants and Harvard
accents were not taboo.

I had entered the American radical milieu in the twilight of
its brief Golden Age, which had reached its high noon just before
the war. United-front slogans had not yet become sources of dis-
union. Differences of opinion were sharp enough, but they re-
mained essentially a family affair. As against the rest of the world,
which meant everyone from J. P. Morgan to Matthew Woll,
there was a solid front.

And the symbol of that unity after 1917 was the Russian revo-
lution. The fact that shiploads of assorted deportees, with every
shade of radical philosophy represented, sailed towards Russia
without the slightest misgivings about the revolution and its course,
is proof of the vitality of that symbol.

In the autumn of 1919, the Workers Defense Union sent me
to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to cover the trial of Charles Krieger, an
I.W.W. organizer accused of dynamiting the home of a Mr. Pew,
a Standard Oil official. I stopped in Kansas City and was met at
the station by the I.W.W. attorney in the case, Fred H. Moore,
and Ella Reeves Bloor, that grand old lady of the American labor
movement who then, as now, was known affectionately as
“Mother” Bloor. Moore, rather sinister-looking under his broad-
brimmed Western hat (a few years later, as defense lawyer for
Sacco and Vanzetti, he was to become the most hated man in
Massachusetts) took in my hundred-odd pounds of scrawny youth-
fulness, my poetic haircut, the bohemian untidiness of my clothes,
in one scowling inspection. He did not trouble to hide his disgust.

“And I thought Gurley was sending us a man!” he said.

Despite this inauspicious reception, we were close friends almost
immediately and remained friends until his death a few years ago.
Books about the American labor and radical movements have not
done justice to Moore. A brilliant lawyer, quixotically devoted and
self-sacrificing, he was handicapped by a genius for non-conformity.
He had started in the Northwest as attorney for the railroads, but
just on the brink of precocious success, had scrapped it and begun
anew in Los Angeles. One day in 1912, he was called on the phone
by a casual I.W.W. acquaintance who had been arrested in a free
speech fight in San Diego. Fred took his hat and his revolver.

PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

14

“Pm running over to San Diego,” he told his law associates,
“to see what I can do for this fellow. I’ll be back soon.”

He returned some twelve years later.

From one labor fight to another he drifted, taking on the cases
that could not afford the more publicized attorneys, the hopeless,
desperate cases in the labor struggle. Many of those legal battles
have become famous in American labor history — the Ettore-Gio-
vanniti case; the Spokane free speech fight; the Everett, Wash.,
case; the Bisbee, Arizona, case; the Wichita I.W.W. case — -but no
share of this fame accrued to him. Always he quarreled with the
defense committees or the clients or got himself into some private
emotional scrape and lost the laurels of victory. Even in the Sacco-
Vanzetti case, to which he gave four years — and there probably
would have been no such case if Moore had not taken hold of it
and turned it to a cause celebre — a well-paid capitalist lawyer in
the end reaped the credit and the fame.

The dynamiting charge against “Big Boy” Krieger, a tall, raw-
boned Pennsylvania Dutchman, was so palpably a frame-up that
no one even pretended it was anything else. The average citizen
of Tulsa, which was then ruled by a vigilante Committee of One
Hundred, merely had a sporting interest in whether the Standard
Oil crowd could make their fantastic invention stick. The case was
the last stage of a determined effort of the oil interests to drive
I.W.W. union agitation, which had been making considerable head-
way, out of the state. Organizers had been beaten, tarred and
feathered, ridden out on rails. But they kept coming back like so
many pesky flies. One night someone set off dynamite under the
Pew porch, where Mrs. Pew normally slept. She wasn’t there,
it happened, and not much harm was done. But the press promptly
headlined it as Red Terror and the authorities proceeded to round
up every known and suspected I.W.W. in Oklahoma.

The police were considerably chagrined when it appeared that
not one of the men taken into custody had been in or near Tulsa
the night of the explosion. After the recent tar-and-feather parties,
the Wobblies had apparently kept at a distance from the city. But
that little detail did not checkmate patriotic ardor. The Red Ter-
ror, the police decided, had been applied by absent treatment.

The gangling Pennsylvania boy, Charlie Krieger, had passed
through Tulsa three days before the dynamiting and had stopped

THE CLOWNING CALLED JUSTICE I 5

overnight at a hotel. The state now charged that he had hired
three notorious yeggs, the renowned John Hall and two of his
young desperadoes, to blow up Pew, and that he had done so
at the express order of Big Bill Haywood in Chicago. By the
time the trial came up, Hall had been committed to Leavenworth
Penitentiary for some Federal crime, but his lieutenants, who were
in an Oklahoma jail, were ready to plead guilty to the Pew dyna-
miting as Kriegeris agents.

That dynamiting had not been the only dirty work that night.
About the same time a post-office had been broken into, its safe
blown, and the contents carried off. The two thugs had originally
been arrested in connection with the post-office job. The dyna-
miting of public buildings carried a fifty years’ prison sentence.
The dynamiting of private dwellings carried only a ten years’ rap.
They knew enough arithmetic to prefer responsibility for the les-
ser job, particularly when the bargain won them some influential
friends. They were ready to plead guilty to the Pew job as agents
of the I.W.W. monster. It was a neat and amusing story. Its
transparency only added to the joy of the occasion.

The prosecution was prepared for everything — except Fred
Moore. The trial, lasting ten weeks, was the longest in the history
of Oklahoma at that time. Every now and then, the court recessed
for a few hours and disposed of some minor matters like murder
cases. Flint Moss, hired by Standard Oil, ostensibly assisting the
public prosecutor, actually was in complete control. Humiliated by
his virtual expulsion from the case, the prosecutor tipped us off
occasionally on Flint’s plans. The judge, a decent fellow and un-
comfortable under the Standard Oil pressure, sometimes called
Moore and myself into his chambers j we talked about life and
literature, but now and then His Honor let fall a hint or two
that helped Moore pull the props from under the frame-up. Even
a court stenographer, being also stenographer for the vigilantes,
telephoned one midnight to warn us that a formal decision had
been reached that evening to run Moore and the other Reds out
of town.

Why the decision was not carried out, and why we were not
riddled by bullets that tense afternoon when Flint Moss, under
the guise of a summation to the jury, all but incited the tensely
hostile crowd in the courtroom to settle us right there and then,

1 6 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

amazed us. Not until afterward did we find out that we had been
under the sharp-eyed protection of a little army of private gun-
men, under orders to shoot down the first man who touched us.
But even if we were sadly ignorant of this invisible and unsolicited
defense, the vigilantes had been apprised of it.

The orders had been issued by the picturesque three-hundred-
pound dictator of a nearby town. He was perhaps the last o f the
oil barons, the only great “independent” operator in that vicinity,
and he hated Standard Oil even as Standard Oil hated Reds. Any-
one accused of an attempt to erase a Standard Oil official auto-
matically rated the support of his private army, recruited from
the prisons of the Southwest under laws permitting the parole of
prisoners who could show respectable jobs waiting for them. The
hulking oil man explained it all to us after the trial, as he sat on
the huge butcher’s block in his refrigerator, oblivious to the cold
while the rest of us congealed slowly into icicles. He was disap-
pointed at Fred Moore’s assurances that Krieger was innocent and
that private terror was no part of the I.W.W. code. Haywood’s
movement there and then lost a potential millionaire recruit.

“Sure,” he said, “my men were all around the courtroom, with
their fingers on the trigger. The Standard Oil bastards knew that
if anyone let loose there’d be hell to pay. Yeh, I’m respected in
these parts, I am.”

He laughed till the immense meat block shook.

The trial, as I said, dragged for many weeks. Every time Moore
demolished an essential sector of the state’s flimsy case, the prose-
cution got a brief adjournment and when court opened again there
it was, with brand-new witnesses to bolster up the blasted sector.
It was most amusing, and Tulsa chuckled. The two rat-faced yeggs
testified in low voices, with downcast eyes, how Krieger had hired
them and Hall to pull the Pew dynamiting job. They were very
convincing in describing how they had stolen the dynamite but
rather vague on the dynamiting itself.

Haywood’s defense committee in Chicago was chronically short
of funds. Besides, more important legal battles had a prior claim.
Our burdens of perjured witnesses, murderous public hostility,
and a frankly unfriendly jury were therefore complicated by
financial distress. I recall the morning when we all turned our
pockets inside out to find that the pooled resources would barely

THE CLOWNING CALLED JUSTICE 1 7

cover coffee and doughnuts. As we chewed the doughnuts, won-
dering when we would eat again, we smiled over a local eight-
column streamer headline “revealing” that a million-dollar fund
was at the disposal of the Red agitators defending Krieger.

The dangers and hardships of our situation drew us closer to-
gether. They added a tang of high adventure to the routine busi-
ness of defending another Wobbly in another frame-up. Besides
Moore and myself, there were the handsome Lola Darroch (dur-
ing the Sacco-Vanzetti case in Boston she became Mrs. Moore);
Caroline Lowe, a sweet spinsterish lady lawyer driven by her social
conscience to defend deportees and I.W.W.’s and to intrude her-
self precisely where her primness seemed most out of place; a
poverty-ridden local attorney named George Bonstein, a Jewish
pioneer of the Indian country with the temerity to tackle the
whole Standard Oil caboodle; and a number of roughneck Wob-
blies whom Moore had saved from jail or the noose at various
times and who hung around like faithful dogs in the hope of
serving him. These latter were not too fastidious about the nature
of the service, nor was Moore himself too finicky. He had no
inhibitions about using the same weapons as the other side, when
necessary. The fact that Standard Oil officials tried to buy him
into their service before he left Tulsa, is some measure of his
equipment. .

2

The most melodramatic episode in that unequal battle, perhaps,
centered around the enigmatic John Hall, a desperado in the best
Jesse James tradition. The state made no effort to bring him from
Leavenworth, preferring to rest on the testimony of his under-
lings. Moore’s problem was whether to bring him in as a defense
witness. It was hazardous business. If our own witness were to
support the other two in their cock-and-bull story, Krieger’s fate
would be sealed. Moore interviewed Hall in his cell but elicited
only a non-committal smile. “What I’ll say is my own business,”
Hall told him.

“That fellow’s a straight-shooter,” Moore reported back to us.
“He’s no rat. I’d stake my life on his telling the truth.”

But he hesitated to stake Krieger’s freedom on his impression.
Caroline Lowe listened. A light flared in her meek eyes. She an-

1 8 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

nounced that she, too, wanted to talk to Hall before a decision
was made. She did, and returned to confirm Moore’s impression.
There was a warmth in her report that made us nudge one an-
other. For years after this Leavenworth meeting, the school-
teacherish Miss Lowe and the notorious killer maintained a cor-
respondence. Up until her untimely death, she tried to obtain his
release. At least she was spared the sorrow of his end. John Hall
was, I believe, the second man to die in the famous lethal cham-
ber experiments in Arizona.

But she had her moment of rapturous pride when Hall, calm,
self-possessed and a little contemptuous, was brought into the
Tulsa courtroom as a defense witness.

It was a courtroom made for paradox. The judge puffed a
big cigar under the “No Smoking” sign crusted with smoke. Spec-
tators with revolvers in their holsters threw “howdy” to their
friends in the jury box. Moore was completely in the dark as to
what Hall’s testimony would be. The prosecution had the post-
office job as a spur to the witness’s memory. But Hall, black as
his record was, did not seek safety at the expense of an innocent
stranger. I have never seen human creatures tremble and wilt as
did the two yeggs when confronted with their gang leader. He
withered them with one slow accusing scrutiny and never once
looked again in their direction. Hall confirmed their story of the
stealing of the dynamite, but denied ever having seen Krieger
before the latter’s arrest. He denied any knowledge of the Pew
explosion. No, he knew nothing of the post-office job either.

“Why did you need dynamite?” Flint Moss hammered at him
hour after hour.

“Oh, I just wanted to blow some stumps out of the road.”

“What did you do with the dynamite?”

“I blew up those stumps. They annoyed me.”

He stuck to the story, unsmiling, calm, while spectators guf-
fawed.

Excessive physical courage is not my chief vice. The threat of
a tar-and-feather party or worse under which we worked occa-
sionally sent undignified thoughts of retreat through my head.
In that week before the trial started, for instance. Perhaps by way
of punishing me for being so young and scrawny when he had
expected a full-sized man, Moore had sent me ahead into Tulsa

THE CLOWNING CALLED JUSTICE 1 9

to investigate the state of mind of the community. I decided to
investigate first of all the state of mind of the spiritual leaders of
Tulsa. I listed all the clergymen in town and started on my
rounds. The first of these men of God was a bulky, red-faced cow-
puncher in appearance. He listened to my story, then leaned over
and gripped my shoulders. There was nothing remotely affection-
ate about that grip.

“Young man,” he said, “I have only one piece of advice for
you. Take the next train out of town, or we’ll hang your hide
on a fence!”

In no less picturesque forms the equivalent advice was proffered
by seven or eight other muscular vicars of the Lord in Tulsa. That
Sunday I was the text of a sermon in one church, I learned from
Monday’s papers. Only the Catholic priest showed any friendli-
ness or any sane resentment against the local Red baiting. I have
had a soft spot in my heart for Catholic priests ever since.

Eventually, I took the stand and quoted the high-minded ad-
vice of the Lord’s anointed, swear- words and all. We did not get
the change of venue we demanded, but we did have the satisfac-
tion of seeing one of the clergymen squirm in his seat. It was the
same clergyman who preached sermons to the jury on Sundays,
since jurors could not be denied the solace of spiritual uplift, on
themes as remote from the case in court as patriotism and foreign
agitators.

Scream headlines out of Centralia, Washington, on Armistice
Day, when the trial was at its height, did not sweeten the atmos-
phere for us. They told how I.W.W.’s had “murdered” American
Legion paraders, making it clear that Krieger and his friends were
part of the same homicidal fraternity. They merely failed to make
clear that the I.W.W. boys had shot in defending their union hall
against violent invasion by over-stimulated patriots.

My reports of the trial, a little late for lack of telegraph tolls
and much too full of indignant adjectives, appeared in the New
York Call , in the Butte Bulletin , and in four or five other labor
papers. A sizzling summary entitled, with a flash of superb origi-
nality, Tulsa: a Study in Oil y appeared under my signature in the
I.W.W. Monthly . An audience heard the story from me at the
Rand School. Then the case entered the limbo of forgotten minor

20

PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

sensations. But in my own mind it remained as sign and symbol
of the clowning that goes by the name of justice.

The jury reported eleven to one for conviction. The one recal-
citrant juror emerged with visible proofs that the arguments used
on him were the kind that left marks on the body. We learned
later that he had had a personal grudge against Standard Oil in
some matter connected with a pipe-line on his farm. His insistence
on Krieger’s innocence apparently had no more to do with the
evidence than the others 5 insistence on Krieger’s guilt.

In a second trial, which I did not attend, the whole case col-
lapsed and Krieger was freed. The last I heard he was settled
down in his home town as a law-abiding plumber with a taste for
solid respectability.

III. On the Eve of Fascism

IN THE autumn of 1920, Italian workers seized the metal plants
in Milan and ran up the red flag. Hope of world revolution,
dimmed by reverses elsewhere, flared up once more. And since I
thought the impending Italian revolution needed its John Reed
out of America no less than its Russian precursor, I was soon in
the steerage of an Italian liner bound for Naples. I was equipped
with credentials from the Federated Press, a struggling labor news
agency, and the Liberator; one cardboard suitcase half-stuflFed
with paper to keep my worldly belongings from rattling ; and that
week’s salary from Financial America by way of sinews of war.

The long hand of Italian anarcho-syndicalism (via a well-placed
word from Carlo Tresca) reached down into the bowels of the
ship and yanked me up into the comforts of officers’ quarters. On
deck I struck up an acquaintance with a slim, shy fellow a few
years my senior, Norman Matson by name. He, too, was inclined
to push the ship along for fear of missing the revolution. For a
day or two, we pretended to be the plenipotentiaries of respectable
capitalist journals. Then we looked one another straight in the
eyes, laughed, and laid our cards — that is to say, our press cre-
dentials — on the table. He, too, was exclusive and authenticated
correspondent for the Federated Press and the Liberator , and a
candidate for the role of Italy’s John Reed. Norman and I shared
a room, our deficits, and our soaring thoughts in the next six
months, and discovered that Italy was brimming over with poten-
tial John Reeds, all representing the Federated Press and the
Liberator.

If the Italian proletariat failed to live up to our expectations,
at least Italy did not. Naples was an extravagant dream come true.
We explored its narrow streets and smelly cafes and stuffy music
halls. We hunted up comrades at Socialist Party headquarters and
wrote reams of “first impressions” which, alas!, never got printed.
We helped a scared and bungling secret service man, assigned to

22

PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

shadow us, to make out his report and treated him to black coffees.
We mixed with Neapolitans in a daze of intoxication that blended
the Bay of Naples and Viva Lenin e Trotsky! > Pompei and social-
ist mass meetings, everything exotically old and desperate, with
the Soviets around the corner.

Then came Rome and the Pension Dinesen and socialist Depu-
ties and Roman girls who exchanged Italian and kisses for Eng-
lish and kisses. We went into homes in crowded side-streets where
grimy children answered to the name of Lenin and Trotsky and
Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg — thousands of these little
Lenins and Liebknechts were destined to be hurriedly re-christened
after the fascist March on Rome. We watched fist fights on the
floor of Parliament and saw the earlier castor-oil episodes in the
rebirth of the glory that was Rome. How I managed to pay the
rent and board at the pension is a miracle somewhat blurred in
memory. A few articles in the Nation helped ; a dollar went a long
way when turned into inflated lire.

Fred Moore, by the time I left for Italy, was in full command
of an obscure case in Boston involving a fishmonger named Barto-
lomeo Vanzetti and a shoemaker named Nicola Sacco. He had
given me explicit instructions to arouse all of Italy to the signifi-
cance of the Massachusetts murder case, and to hunt up certain
witnesses and evidence. The Italian labor movement, however,
had other things to worry about. An ex-socialist named Benito
Mussolini and a locust plague of blackshirts, for instance. Some-
how I did get pieces about Sacco and Vanzetti into Avanti ! , which
Mussolini had once edited, and into one or two other papers.
I even managed to stir up a few socialist onorevoles , like Deputy
Mucci from Sacco’s native village in Puglia, and Deputy Misiano,
a Sicilian firebrand at the extreme Left. Mucci brought the Sacco-
Vanzetti affair to the floor of the Chamber of Deputies, the first
jet of foreign protest in what was eventually to become a pounding
international flood.

Norman and I went to Livorno to witness the epochal congress
of the Socialist Party, which saw the birth of a Communist Party
and the tragic splintering of the Left forces that opened the road
to Mussolini’s legions. We consorted only with the communist
wing, of course, and sang paeans of praise for Terracini and Bom-
bacci and the other leaders. Nothing less than immediate revo-

ON THE EVE OF FASCISM 23

lution suited our fervor and theirs. The excessive caution of the
parliamentarians and timid evolutionists, we were convinced, had
nipped a Soviet revolution in the bud when the metal workers
took over the factories. Resentment against the lost opportunity
smoldered in our hearts and flamed into oratory from the Left.
We had on our side, moreover, the weight of the triumphant
Russian proletariat whose agents were in Livorno to guide and
inspire. What matter if the Bolshevik faction was a minority in
this conference, since it spoke with the voice of the Third Inter-
national, not to mention History and Humanity?

Only one argument directed against the Left baffled its orators.
It was hurled at them by Serrati from the Center and Modigliani
from the Right. In the light of subsequent Italian history that
argument seems irony at its most tragic.

“A dictatorship may be possible in Russia,” the Left was re-
peatedly admonished, “but surely, comrades, it is unthinkable in
our country. We Italians are individualists, anarchists, by nature.
Discipline, blind obedience? Ma che! When an Italian sees a ( No
Smoking 5 sign in a tramcar or theater, it reminds him to light up.
To talk of organized restraint and dictatorship in our land is
foolishness ! 55

Even the communists could not deny anything so axiomatic.
They said that in Italy, maybe, the new social order would be
established without the need for dictatorial methods. A little more
than a year later the fascist dictatorship was in force. . . .

Though we posed as correspondents, the Livorno congress was
no mere “story 55 for Norman and me. We felt it to be an exten-
sion of the civil warfare over in Soviet Russia, a local sector on
the widening front of an international class struggle. We cheered
and booed at the proper points along with communist sympathizers
in the six steep galleries of the Teatro Goldoni.

But the Associated Press correspondent, come from Fiume for
the occasion, took the proceedings less seriously. He was never
quite sure who was Left or Right or why. Nothing in his training
as a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, police reporter had prepared him
to record an epoch-making split in the Italian socialist ranks. In-
deed, his private summary of the talk-fest was remarkable both
for its simplicity and comprehensiveness. Strolling between Nor-
man and myself after a stormy session, he confided it to us:

24 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

“Just look at ’em! Karl Marx and the other guy with the alfalfa
on his chin whose pictures are on the wall, and Bombacci, Serrati,
Modigliani!”— he called off the leaders of all the factions who
happened to wear beards — “just a lot of Jews!”

The other guy with the alfalfa, of course, was Friedrich Engels,
as Germanic as Bismarck. Bombacci, the eccentric commanist
leader, was an ex-priest. Only one or two of the other leaders in
the limelight were Jews, and in Italy the anti-Semitic issue was
never a serious factor. But for a Pittsburgher whiskers are whiskers.

The exigencies of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense took me to the
southern olive and grape provinces, into Sacco’s native village of
Torremaggiore. I found that his elder brother, Sabino Sacco, was
the socialist sindaco (mayor) of Torremaggiore. Red flags were
flying over the municipal building and the cooperative store, and
nearly every infant born since November, 1917, was named for
some Bolshevik deity. I even saw a baby “Soviet” peacefully suck-
ing her mother’s breast. Rumors of the blackshirt camions rumbled
even through Puglia, and occasionally violent incidents were re-
ported from larger towns. But the suggestion that a fascist regime
was in the offing would have sounded like gibberish to Torre-
maggiore and a thousand other villages gesturing with red flags
and Russian catch-phrases.

Sacco-Vanzetti matters also sent me into the Marchesan hills,
beyond Jesi, to a sleepy, mud-colored village called Santa Maria
Nove. I tracked down an anarchist deportee from Massachusetts,
whose yellow-haired wife wept for the vanished glories of life in
a New England shoe town, snatched from her by the ardor of
Mitchell Palmer’s agents. The man’s shelves were lined with
brochures on the home manufacture of bombs and he professed
himself a terrorist of the Galleani school. So deep, however, had
the fear of American law and police entered his heart that it
needed a week of pleading and threatening and pressure by Mer-
lino, the grand old man of the anarcho-syndicalist movement, to
bring this terrorist to the point of signing an innocuous affidavit in
support of Sacco’s alibi.

No sooner had I descended from the Marchesan heights, though,
than he recovered his magnificent courage. It expressed itself in
a colored picture post-card addressed to me at my prim Danish
pension and showed an anarchist iconoclast hurling a smoking

ON THE EVE OF FASCISM

25

bomb at a row of gods. My standing with the Roman police
must have been greatly improved by this belated boldness at my
expense. It was not the only time I was to meet bomb-throwing
bravado masking abject cowardice.

Already, in the civil strife between blackshirts and communists
or socialists, the casualties were too numerous for the newspapers
to report in full. Daily tallies of the number of Reds and Blacks
killed all over the country had to suffice, and the preponderance
of communist over fascist deaths increased rapidly. The legend
which pictures the March on Rome as a bloodless seizure of power
ignores the ferocious blood-letting which preceded it.

2

Panic spread in the Italian labor ranks. Almost overnight it
seemed, after the Livorno split, the sense of confidence and faith
in their own strength departed from the revolutionary elements.
An influx of communist refugees from Hungary, after the col-
lapse of Bela Kun’s government, deepened the gloom in the Italian
circles with which I was in contact. Norman and I smuggled a few
of these homeless, penniless refugees into our hotel room for a
period and heard hair-raising tales of torture in Horthy’s prisons.
One boy bared his back and chest by way of illustration. They
were thickly sown with tiny raw wounds. “Cigarette burns," he
explained, “a favorite Hungarian amusement.”

I followed the news out of Russia with anxious and intimate
concentration. Every defeat of some interventionist or counter-
revolutionary general, every advance of the Soviet forces into
Poland, was a personal triumph. There came a day when the
Soviet drive was turned back at the very gates of Warsaw, and
the bottom seemed to drop out of my own life.

I remember pacing the roof of our fension with Norman, dis-
cussing that blow. It seemed to us that the fate of all history, of
the whole human race, was in the balance. If Soviet Russia were
beaten, we decided, the darkness of reaction and barbarism would
settle over the universe for centuries (we reckoned glibly in cen-
turies in our idealistic trance of those days).

The only bright spot in the encroaching gloom was the arrival
of Vorovsky as Moscow’s first Ambassador to Italy, and the open-

PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

26

ing of the Soviet Embassy. It fired anew my half-conscious ambi-
tion to reach Soviet Russia. I seized eagerly at the suggestion of
a Soviet attache that he might use me as secret courier to Moscow
— an American would be a safer messenger across the more danger-
ous stretches between Rome and the Kremlin. Arrangements to
this end were in swing at the time I was arrested and expelled
from Italy. Chagrin over the spoiling of those plans was, in fact,
the bitterest ingredient in my expulsion.

It was while about to depart for a town in central Italy, after
the second bell had been sounded and the locomotive strained at
its leash awaiting the final signal, that half a dozen detectives piled
into my coupe and took me into custody.

A tall, thin, mysterious and rather dandified Balkan fellow —
I never did ascertain whether he was Montenegrin or Serbian or
Bulgarian — who was my traveling companion was arrested at the
same time. I had met him in Italy through anarchist acquaintances
and listened in fascinated horror to his boastful stories of revolu-
tionary exploits. Pulling off fingernails to extract ransom money
for the cause from bloated landlords and capitalists was, I recall,
among his routine procedures. None of the money, at the moment,
was in his pockets and the ease with which I parted from my few
lire was evidently my chief recommendation to him. On my part
I felt compensated by the atmosphere of recondite mystery and
adventure that surrounded him.

When Moore wrote me emphasizing the critical importance of
obtaining the photograph of an Italian criminal who, as nearly as
I could figure out, may have been mixed up in the crime for which
Sacco and Vanzetti were being tried, I naturally turned to my
Balkan friend for assistance. We were about to embark on the
important mission of stealing a photograph from the home of that
criminaPs parents in central Italy when the law took us in hand.

We were separated and I never saw the man again. To this
day I do not know whether I was picked up on his account, or
he on mine. From questions in the course of that day’s intensive
grilling I surmised that in the eyes of the Italian police, at least,
my companion was a terrorist of some importance. But my own
brief record of amateur dabbling in revolution was not unknown
to the police either.

On the commissario’s desk, when I was ushered into his pres-

ON THE EYE OF FASCISM 27

ence, was a dossier in which I caught glimpses of my articles in
The Nation and other publications and what looked like copies of
my private mail. In my pockets and baggage nothing more in-
criminating than a few Sacco- Vanzetti pamphlets and letters in
Billy’s childish scrawl were discovered.

By the end of the day, after I had been formally presented
with a paper ordering me to leave the country in twenty-four
hours, the commissario had achieved a paternal attitude towards
his American charge. At twenty-two I looked eighteen and
weighed a hundred-odd pounds. Although a few hours before he
had threatened to turn me over to the fascisti for a castor-oil
purge, he now draped his arm around my shoulders in the most
fatherly manner.

“I am a Sicilian, my son,” he said, “and we Sicilians have a
proverb. It’s a good proverb and I recommend it to you. Ammazza,
ammazza, e tutta una razza. (Kill, kill, it is all a race.) Stop
bothering with the Saccos and Vanzettis and the socialist dogs,
and take care of your own interests.”

He fumbled among the confiscated contents of my pockets and
found the picture of the wide-eyed little girl whose letters he
had read.

“Go home,” he said, “marry this beautiful girl and come back
here for a honeymoon.”

Nearly ten years later I did bring the girl to Rome. As we
walked and drove through the streets, I kept hoping -unreason-
ably that the commissario would suddenly appear. Perhaps he was
among the hundreds of men in black shirts who were operating
on his Sicilian proverb.

The intercession of my friends among the socialist deputies won
me a few additional days of grace. Then I was escorted to the
French frontier. The escort, in civilian clothes, watched until I
was safely on the French side of the turnstile at the border station.

I was literally without a penny when I stepped off the train in
Paris, but by evening was installed in that sanctuary of impecuni-
ous American newspapermen, the Paris Herald. I lied about un-
derstanding French in order to obtain the job, and rewrote items
out of the French paper largely by intuition during the month
I survived on the job. The intuition played me false on occasion
and Americans on the Continent, I fear, were given some strange

28 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

versions of French current events. By the end of the month I re-
ceived a check from America just big enough to pay my way home.

Just big enough, with a few francs to spare for the trip. Un-
luckily my ship needed some repairs and kept the passengers wait-
ing in Havre. The few francs paid for a bed in a sailors 5 hotel but
left nothing for food. It was a very hungry young man, a little
groggy from weakness, who fell to when at last we were permit-
ted to board the boat and taste its fare. It was a delightful trip,
devoted to reading and flirting, its beauty somewhat marred by
two circumstances. First, because I had no money for cigarettes,
and could not bring myself to sponge on others, I pretended that
I did not smoke. Second, despite all that a rubber eraser could
do, my collar and cuffs grew dingier and their owner more em-
barrassed every day; I lacked a clean change.

Shamefacedly I borrowed a nickel from a fellow passenger to
take me from the pier to my parents 5 home in Brooklyn. Two
checks awaited me, one from The Nation and another from The
Freeman . Never before or since has money looked bigger. The
whole European adventure seemed fantastic and wasteful to my
family, which still cherished a slight though fast-fading hope
that I would “succeed 55 despite my penchant for strange friends
and strange travels. I did not attempt to explain or justify my-
self. Instead, I betook myself to a department store, bought a
collection of foreign-looking trinkets and presented them non-
chalantly as gifts from Paris.

May they forgive me the deception when they read these words !

IV. I Defend Sacco and Vanzetti

BEFORE the end of that week I was on a boat bound for Boston,
where Sacco and Vanzetti had already been condemned to death.
Billy, whose picture had struck a paternal spark from a Sicilian
heart, was on the boat with me, uninvited, but gloriously welcome.
She was nearly seventeen now and magically ripened to woman-
hood during my long year of absence. Her beauty seemed to me
to transcend even the high promise of her loveliness as a child
which had captivated me just ten years before. The mysterious
half-realized attraction touched by adolescent embarrassment
which had drawn us together across the chasm of six years 5 dif-
ference in age suddenly acquired a name: love. In a few weeks
we were married.

Our fourteen months in Boston were hectic with excitement, as
an obscure and seemingly dull murder case expanded into a world-
wide cause celebre unparalleled since the Dreyfus affair. They
were filled, too, with the bitterness of defeat and frustration, as
we bruised ourselves against the unyielding granite of laws and
precedents and prejudice in the sanctimonious robes of formal
justice.

But they were months edged with the ecstasy of young love.
We were pleased to find a small, inexpensive apartment right in
Back Bay. Gradually, reading newspaper reports of police raids
on adjoining houses, it dawned on us that we had settled in a
“red light 55 district. Far from being distressed, the discovery pro-
vided a fillip of amusement to the enchantments of our young
marriage.

A Supreme Court Justice, though he knew nothing about it,
solved the great problem of furniture for our two-room home.
Mrs. Elizabeth Glendower Evans, the hundred arms of whose
mothering instinct embraced everything young and helpless in
sight, had become aware of the problem. She had the key to the
Brookline cellar where Justice Brandeis had stored some old fur-

29

go PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

niture on moving to Washington. We selected everything that an
impecunious couple could desire to feather their nest. V* hen I
met Justice Brandeis at his Cape Cod summer home the following
year and confessed the theft, I discovered that Mrs, Evans had
not overestimated his generosity.

The arrest of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti on May 5,
1920, was not mentioned outside the local press. Their conviction
on July 14, 1921, rated exactly seven and a half inches on an
inside page of the New York Times . Their execution six years
later, on August 23, 1927, received five full pages in the same
newspaper, several of them recording the sorrow and anger of
millions of men and women in every country in the world.

A thousand different factors contributed toward that extraor-
dinary growth of the case. The obscurity of the simple, uncouth
protagonists ; the unctuous smugness of the Brahmin New Eng-
land which rallied against them; the fury of Red-baiting in
America in the post-war years— everything combined to give the
drama and the players a heightened significance. The protracted
struggle achieved a peculiar symbolic quality for all men in their
own lives. It challenged their institutions and tested their pro-
fessed ideals. It ripped the varnished surface off American life
and revealed the deep fissures of class and race antagonisms under-
neath. A simple murder case, it evolved into a complicated and
terrifying sacrificial rite.

In a book called The Life and Death of Sacco and Vanzetti ,
published immediately after the men were electrocuted, I wrote:

These aliens by a strange chance combined in their obscure persons
all the things that most offended and frightened a smug New Eng-
lander. In a section where family pride and an ingrown sense of racial
superiority flourished, Sacco and Vanzetti were from the lowest social
layer of wops and hunkies and polaks. At a time when Bolshevism gave
householders nightmares, Sacco and Vanzetti were by their own confes-
sion reddest of the Reds. With the textile industry drifting to the South
and the shoe industry to the West, in a period of strikes and discontent,
Sacco and Vanzetti were self-confessed labor agitators. Amidst a raging
blood-fed patriotism, they were slackers. In Puritan New England they
were atheists.

It required no special effort or apparatus to generate fear of and
hatred for the two men. They attracted the fears and hatreds already

I DEFEND SACCO AND VANZETTI 3 I

in full play. The belief of some that agents of the Department of Justice
and of the State of Massachusetts got together and decided to electro-
cute them, innocent or guilty, is naive.

It was not a frame-up in the ordinary sense of the word. It was a
far more terrible conspiracy: the almost automatic clicking of the ma-
chinery of government spelling out death for two men with the utmost
serenity. No more laws were stretched or violated than in most other
criminal cases. No more stool-pigeons were used. No more prosecution
tricks were played. Only in this case every trick worked with a deadly
precision. The rigid mechanism of legal procedure was at its most un-
bending. The human beings who operated the mechanism were guided
by dim, vague, deep-seated motives of fear and self-interest.

It was a frame-up implicit in the social structure. It was a perfect
example of the functioning of class justice, in which every judge, juror,
police officer, editor, governor and college president played his appointed
role easily and without undue violence to his conscience. A few even
played it with an exalted sense of their own patriotism and nobility.

Many of those who were outraged by the deaths of Sacco and
Vanzetti resented this interpretation. They preferred to regard it
as a deliberate “plot to railroad two workers/ 2 * * * * 7 and themselves as
the heroic if unsuccessful rescuers. But their hero-and-villain pat-
tern seemed to me false and petty against the reality of vast in-
choate forces at play on both sides. To me the whole thing shaped
up not as melodrama but as epic tragedy.

2

Though I did not formulate it in these terms until I had at-
tained the perspective of time, I think that I sensed the epic quality

from the first. All of us who defended the two Italians were
wholly and deeply convinced of their innocence. Yet it was pro-
foundly right that the question of innocence and guilt should
become, as it did, of secondary importance to both sides, because
the issues involved were wider than the character or destiny of
two men. Those who rallied to our side, a relatively, small and
despised group at first, did so as inevitably and often as irrationally

as the others who leagued against us. .The case, I felt, was a cata-

lytic agent that crystallized forces until then held in a deceptively

unified social solution.

2 2 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

Fred Moore was at heart an artist. Instinctively he recognized
the materials of a world issue in what appeared to others a i outine
matter. A socialist newspaperman spent a few days in Boston and
returned to New York to report that “there' s no story in it . . .
just a couple of wops in a jam.” Not one of the members of the
defense committee formed immediately after the men’s arrest sus-
pected that the affair was anything larger than it seemed. When
the case grew into a historical tussle, these men were utterly be-
wildered. But Moore saw its magnitude from the first. His legal
tactics have been the subject of dispute and recrimination. I think
that there is some color of truth, indeed, to the charge that he
sometimes subordinated the literal needs of legalistic procedure to
the larger needs of the case as a symbol of class struggle. If he
had not done so, Sacco and Vanzetti would have died six years
earlier, without the solace of martyrdom.

With the deliberation of a composer evolving the details of a
symphony which he senses in its rounded entirety, Moore pro-
ceeded to clarify and deepen the elements implicit in the case.
And first of all he aimed to delineate the class character of the
automatic prejudices that were operating against Sacco and Van-
zetti. Sometimes over the protests of the men themselves he cut
through legalistic conventions to reveal underlying motives. Small
wonder that the pinched, dyspeptic judge and the pettifogging
lawyers came to hate Moore with a hatred that was admiration
turned inside out. He was not “playing the game” according to
their sacred rules.

Perhaps his most difficult task, and therefore his most creative
achievement, was to show the two Italians as types and symbols
of workmen everywhere. Labor elements in other countries recog-
nized Sacco and Vanzetti as their own long before American work-
ers consented to this identification. American labor, and especially
the portion organized into conservative trade unions, at first re-
jected violently the implication that these two foreigners — self-
confessed anarchists, internationalists, atheists — were in any sense
representative American workers. Their social views were “un-
American.” To accept them as brothers was to throw doubt on
the middle-class delusions of the bona fide labor movement.

Vanzetti had worked as an unskilled laborer, peddled fish and
taken some part in local strike agitations. Sacco was a skilled shoe

I DEFEND SACCO AND VANZETTI 33

worker. But as anarchists they neither sympathized nor cooperated
with the organized American labor movement, which they re-
garded as simply a part of the apparatus of capitalist enslavement.
Despite this, American labor in the end was obliged to overcome
its first revulsion and accept the Sacco- Vanzetti case as in large
measure its own. Moore had slashed through the many layers of
outer differences to the core of identity between Sacco and Van-
zetti and all other workmen. To accomplish this, he did not hesi-
tate to use any and all instrumentalities of publicity. On the one
hand, the labor records of the two men were “built up” and em-
phasized ; on the other, the attitudes of the prosecution were ex-
posed as essentially anti-labor.

By the time I arrived on the scene, John Nicholas Beffel and
others had already done the groundwork, under Moore’s guidance,
in this connection. Because my presence, in 1921-22, happened to
coincide with the period when the case exploded into world sig-
nificance, I received at the time more credit (or blame, depending
on the point of view) than I merited. A series of articles in the
old New York World by Samuel Spewack, in particular, sensa-
tionalized and exaggerated my role. I figured in his version as
one of three men — an Italian, a Spaniard and a young American —
who sat at their typewriters in a chilly little office in Boston and
incited the whole world to protest. This journalistic simplification
infuriated me. As a matter of fact, Felicani, Lopez and I, writing
articles and news stories in Italian, Spanish, and English, respec-
tively, were very minor factors in a situation that had outgrown
all of us by that time and was rolling along on its own momentum.

It is a curious fact that Sacco and Vanzetti, whose names are
linked inseparably, saw one another very rarely in the seven years
between their arrest and electrocution. Sacco was kept in the county
jail at Dedham, Vanzetti in Charlestown Prison. Only on those
rare occasions when some new hearing or empty formality brought
them into court did they meet, embrace, and chat briefly. Several
times, almost a year elapsed before they met again. By the time
their cold bodies were laid out on adjoining marble slabs in the
death chamber, they had become almost strangers.

Of the same race, the same political faith, their destinies inter-
twined, they were yet men of the most contrasting temperaments
and minds. Sacco was the Latin at his most impetuous, a man of

PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

34

emotion rather than logic, driven literally to madness on at least
two occasions by the ordeal of imprisonment and waiting. The
separation from his pretty red-headed wife and his two children,
from friends and work, consumed his flesh and shook his reason.
A week of incarceration for a man like Sacco was more terrible
than a year for the more phlegmatic and contemplative Vanzetti.
Sacco was a caged and raging animal; Vanzetti seemed a monk in
calm seclusion. Under the ferocious Italian mustaches which gave
him a look of fierceness in the eyes of the ordinary American, the
fishmonger from Piemonte had ascetic features and eyes of a
tenderness that haunted one.

With every year of imprisonment Vanzetti seemed to grow
calmer, gentler, more philosophic. His was the consolation of
genuine martyrdom in which there was no rancor but an ever-
deepening understanding. Where Sacco had acquired his anarchist
beliefs at second-hand, more attracted by its harsh code than its
philosophy, Vanzetti had read and studied the poets and prophets
of his faith. His mind was crystal clear and expanded immensely
in the enforced leisure of his seven years’ isolation. Some of his
letters and speeches from the prisoners’ cage have the ring of
enduring literature — this despite his use of English, an alien, half-
apprehended tongue. Certainly the scene while he was being
strapped into the electric chair, when he proffered his forgiveness
to those who were about to snuff out his life, belongs among the
high moments in the history of the human spirit.

3

I saw Sacco and Vanzetti frequently, either in the company of
Moore or alone. But in the fight that reverberated through all the
nations and made their linked names a familiar word, their own
roles were passive. They merely waited. My day-to-day contacts
were with members of the defense committee, zealous Puritan
ladies, visiting reporters, lawyers, wrathful anarchists, conniving
communists, distressed liberals, local newspapermen and the ex-
traordinary assortment of men and women drawn together by a
common interest in freeing the two men.

In the final year of the case five years later, the liberal intel-
lectuals rushed belatedly and flamboyantly to the rescue. But at

I DEFEND SACCO AND VANZETTI 35

this juncture the affair had not yet become respectable or suf-
ficiently notorious. The enlightened attorneys, poets, novelists,
columnists, educators who were to hold the spotlight in the last
frenzied months of the futile fight in 1927 were with few excep-
tions blissfully oblivious to the affair in 1921-22.

It was a motley and colorful and rather high-pitched company
that gathered around the defense at this stage. Some were moved
by an undiluted urge to save two innocent men, others were in-
terested primarily in the propagandist value of the case, still others
got an emotional kick out of the battle. At one extreme were hot-
headed and desperate Italians and Spaniards distrustful of all law,
bitterly sarcastic about the hocus-pocus of motions and affidavits,
and often refusing on principle to cooperate with their own law-
yers. At the other extreme were men and women of old New Eng-
land stock chiefly concerned with saving the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts from the stigma of an ugly miscarriage of justice.
I can recall vital meetings in which a snarling, red-headed little
Italian exponent of direct action argued some question of policy
with a benign pacifist like Mrs. Evans. It was Moore’s delicate job
to reconcile these people and placate their idiosyncrasies.

Because we all worked under great tension, in a ceaseless fer-
ment of hope and despair, we moved in a strangely electrical
atmosphere, surcharged with emotion and at moments touched
with hysteria. Lack of funds forced a great many of the group to
live very closely together in one narrow house on Rollins Place,
and that scarcely helped matters. If anyone could record that house,
its people, its complicated cross-currents of conflicting political phi-
losophies, the erotic overtones characteristic of nervous strain, what
an incredible novel it would make!

Commonplace stenographers accidentally drawn into this in-
tense atmosphere developed into flaming radicals. Roughneck de-
tectives sprouted a social conscience. Cautious A. F. of L. officials
hobnobbed with foreign firebrands. A milk-white, golden-haired
little poetess swept like a tornado through the defense group,
working havoc among the harassed men and spreading despair
among their wives and sweethearts; she dominated the lives of
a writer, a strike leader, a lawyer and a Boston newspaperman in
quick succession, with forays into the domestic preserves of half a
dozen others, while composing soulful verses in defense of the

36 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

accused Italians. A gawky, half-savage boy lured from the Maine
woods to plead with his mother, a crucial identification witness, to
retract her perjured testimony, had to be forced, literally, to take
a bath 5 soon he blossomed into a spick-and-span U. S. Marine. One
of the closest comrades and most ardent defenders of Sacco fell
hopelessly in love with Sacco’s wife (he married her after Sacco’s
execution). Within the larger drama of the case, there developed
complicated cycles of lesser dramas of private emotion*

Of the reporters who had covered the trial for local newspapers
and the great press agencies, not one believed that the foreigners
had been proved guilty. A few of them, on the contrary, were
deeply convinced of the men’s innocence, so that several prominent
Boston newspapermen, like Sibley and Folsom, sided openly with
the defense. The newspapers themselves, however, were a solid
phalanx against us.

I had a privileged inside view of their attitude. In one of the
frequent periods when the defense committee went completely
broke, I got myself a job on the Boston Telegram , a scandal-
monger sheet now happily out of existence and unmourned. It
occurred to no one on the staff, fortunately, to connect me with
my notorious namesake at defense headquarters. I enjoyed the
ticklish sensation of seeing my Sacco-Vanzetti publicity releases
kicked into the waste-basket with a growl of distaste while feature
stories under my signature were being published in the paper $
and of writing inflammatory defense literature on the Telegram’s
time and typewriter. I attended to many an assignment by the city
editors on the telephone from the Sacco-Vanzetti office.

The rigmarole of legalistic gestures unrolled slowly and dully.
More motions for a new trial based on new evidence, confessions
of perjury by state witnesses, exposes of other state witnesses
as criminals — and every motion matched by a denial from the
self-righteous Judge Webster Thayer. All the forms of justice
were preserved, only the spirit was absent. Many years later I
wrote: “Sacco and Vanzetti were given all their legal rights.
They were deprived only of their liberty and their lives.”

V. Working for the Soviets

JUST before the birth of my daughter, in November, 1922, I re-
turned to New York. I had been away more than two years, in
Europe and then in Boston, and was unaware how completely
the revolutionary milieu in the metropolis had changed. I had
simply been too engrossed in the specific job of defending the
two Italians — one of the few issues on which all factions agreed
— to gauge the depth of the new hatreds among yesterday’s com-
rades. What had been a many-sided radical movement had dis-
integrated into so many sects. The Golden Age of American radi-
calism was ended.

Unhesitatingly I cast my lot with the communists. I devoted the
next five years largely to Soviet activities. For a year I edited
the first popular American magazine about Russia, the Soviet
Russia Pictorial , and for four years thereafter, until the day I
sailed for the U.S.S.R., I worked for the official Soviet news
agency, Tass.

I did not join the Communist Party and consequently was never
on the inside of its involved and embittered political life. Such
close-ups of the internal party machinery as I had by reason of
my everyday work strengthened my obstinacy in resisting solicita-
tions to join up. In any organization which rests on absolute disci-
pline, there is no intermediate role between leadership and blind
obedience. I had not the slightest taste for one and a definite dis-
taste for the other. This incapacity for organization and discipline
I counted a defect in my character. My instinct was always to
undertake specific tasks and to carry them through as best I could,
whether it happened to be the preparation of a strike leaflet or
the contribution of a newspaper column.

My entire social environment in those years, however, was
communist and Soviet. In a loyalty to the Russian revolution
which outweighed in my mind all considerations of past friend-
ship or present advantage, I broke relations with most of my old

37

38 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

acquaintances who were still in the Socialist Party. Enthusiastically,
I contributed my share to the rancor directed against that party.
Its members were Mensheviks, Social-Democrats, henchmen of
Germany’s Scheidemanns, Noskes, and Eberts, and therefore, in
Bolshevik and near-Bolshevik eyes, more despicable by far than
capitalists. They were deserters, “renegades.”

The legions of the damned grew apace in those years, as radi-
cals of divers denominations failed in the decisive test of their
political morals by casting doubt on any phase of the Soviet ex-
periment. It did not occur to me to examine the statements of
people who went to Moscow to pray and emerged to scoff, since
the process of investigation would have implied blasphemous
doubts. The fact that Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, many
other deportees from America abandoned the Soviet land, pre-
ferring a capitalist exile, was for us a commentary on these people
rather than on the Soviets.

We did not content ourselves with impugning their sanity, but
tarred them as knaves, liars, self-seeking betrayers. A lifetime of
exemplary devotion to the cause of the revolution did not save
an anarchist, socialist or I.W.W. from the hot pitch of our epithets;
on the contrary, the more impressive the culprit’s record the more
urgent was our compulsion to level him with the dust.

I was among the more temperate in this respect, yet I know
the anger that flared in my heart against those who attacked
the Soviets. If they were bourgeois journalists, middle-class tour-
ists, even milk-and-water liberals, their blasphemy could be ex-
plained along orthodox class lines and discounted. But if they were
workers, socialists, active radicals, they must be marked with the-
mark of Cain and sent wandering in the wilderness of bourgeois
turncoats.

Soviet Russia Pictorial was the progenitor of the many illustrated
magazines about Russian achievements now on the American news
stands. It was at the time the mouthpiece of the Friends of Soviet
Russia and its primary purpose was to help raise funds for famine
relief. Far from concealing the horrors of the Volga famine and
the incapacity of the young workers’ republic to cope with the dis-
aster, we spread the facts on record as gruesomely as possible in
text and picture to stimulate charity from the Left. The horrors,
however, were amply balanced by panegyrics for the Soviet lead-

WORKING FOR THE SOVIETS 39

ers and their works. If the wounds of the civil wars were still
raw and painful, the romance and elation likewise were fresh. The
mere fact that a Socialist Soviet State was in existence was a
miracle to halo each new day.

All the giants of the revolution were still alive and in active
control. Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev,* Kamenev,* Rakovsky,f
Radek,t Dzherzhinsky — flaming names to light new vistas of his-
tory. We knew the warmth that only people who possess a private
pantheon can know. The circumstance that infidels regarded our
gods as devils merely testified to the awesome significance of our
deities and attested our position as a chosen and anointed people.
Trotsky, Zinoviev, and others destined to be expelled from the
pantheon, figured so heroically on our pages, in fact, that by
1928 a bound volume of the magazine which I brought into Mos-
cow seemed a counter-revolutionary document. The volume was
borrowed by Olga Kameneva, sister of Trotsky and wife of Kame-
nev, and never returned. To the best of my recollection we did
not have occasion to use Stalin’s picture once while I edited this
Soviet publication — an interesting commentary on how grievously
American communists underrated him as late as 1923.

My associate on the editorial staff who, if the truth be told,
did the major part of the work, was a man of encyclopaedic knowl-
edge with whom the accumulation of recondite facts, figures,
dates, and anecdotes was a grand passion, one Max Podolsky. $ The
deep-dyed cynicism of Max’s well-stocked mind made him proof
against the lush enthusiasms in which those around him wallowed.
He had been active in the revolutionary movements of at least
half a dozen European nations, had sampled prisons in most Euro-
pean capitals, and had known many of the Bolshevik gods before
their apotheosis. He proceeded on the assumption that all heroes
have clay feet and that power is a dangerous narcotic even for
revolutionaries. His support of the Soviet system was therefore
leavened with large mental reservations. He worked loyally
enough but with a distinctly counter-revolutionary twinkle in his
eyes.

* Executed in August, 1936.

f Imprisoned in 1937.

t Better known as Max Nomad, author of Rebels and Renegades and other
significant books.

40

PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

2

The Soviet news agency, at the time I entered its service as
general assistant to Kenneth Durant, the American director, was
called Rosta. Later the name was changed to Tass. It opei ated
on an agreement for exchange of facilities with the United Press
and had its headquarters in one of the United Press offices in
the old World Building. Our job was to report the news of the
entire Western hemisphere as it poured over the U.P. wires.

While we naturally emphasized aspects of the social and eco-
nomic struggle, and went in for earnest analysis of political con-
ditions everywhere from Canada to Cape Horn, our dispatches
were as realistic and uncolored as we could make them. It was
Durant’s theory that Moscow needed a truthful picture of af-
fairs on this side of the Atlantic— whether it found it politic to
publish the picture was its own affair. At no time, in the years
that I worked under him, did he knowingly permit the picture
to be touched up to please the wishful thinking of communists
here or abroad.

Thus, while communist politicians in America, partly through
the ardor of their hopes and partly to magnify their own impor-
tance, fed the Kremlin empty promises of American recognition
and apocryphal communist victories, our news service provided
the antidote of unadulterated facts. Not infrequently the reports
of American party functionaries on some local situation and our
report gave totally different accounts.

I was decidedly under the spell of Durant’s personality during
our years of collaboration. He was a man of sharp mind and dour
disposition, whose rapier of malice was sheathed in a scabbard of
pervasive charm. In one mad jump, he had cleared the immense
social territory between Rittenhouse Square and Sovietism. I say
Sovietism rather than communism advisedly. It was communism
as a functioning and ruthless system, backed by armies and secret
services, I think, that fascinated him rather than communism as
a philosophy of human emancipation. I was to meet others from
the upper social strata who are thus captivated by a distant pro-
letariat, triumphant and regnant, but feel not the faintest kin-
ship for the flesh-and-blood proletarians all around them. Ken-

WORKING FOR THE SOVIETS

41

neth’s frank dislike of all American communists flowed from his
natural aversion to the “lower” social orders, though he would
have denied this most vehemently.

Tall, thin, with aristocratically ascetic features and a ruthless
wit, Kenneth had the intolerance of a recent convert. Uncon-
sciously he tried to make up for his advantages of social and edu-
cational background, for the fact that he was a foreigner in the
adopted land of revolution, by harshness toward non-believers in
general and backsliders in particular. In full eruption against a
political renegade, Kenneth was a magnificent and disquieting
spectacle. Those who offended him personally (and every real or
imagined slur on the Soviets he counted a personal affront) be-
came the objects of his anxious, brooding, and patient attentions.
The maze of his character was a subject of discussion among those
of us under his spell, I recall Joseph Freeman remarking in one
such discussion that Kenneth, given the scope, had the makings
of a Torquemada. He had a nose for heresy which did not often
mislead him and a bloodhound persistence in following the trail.

Emotionally and professionally I lived close to the new Rus-
sia. I read all the books on Russia, saw its motion pictures, be-
friended some of its emissaries, discussed it with returning tourists
or American communists, defended it against detractors, steeped
myself in its legends and lingo. For months at a stretch, when
Durant was visiting Russia or ill, I conducted the Tass bureau,
and corresponded with Jacob Doletzky, the head of the organiza-
tion, or Constantine Umansky, then its foreign editor, or others
whom I was to meet before long in Moscow. This direct relation
with the center of world revolution, though limited to the routine
of news dispatches and cable tolls and technical news-gathering
problems, surrounded the work with an aura of importance. It gave
me a precious sense of nearness to the one thing that counted
above all other things in the modern world.

As an employee of a Soviet organization, it was impolitic, of
course, for me to participate openly in the radical movement in
America. But from time to time I was sucked into its vortex all
the same. As long as Moore remained in Boston, I maintained an
active interest in the Sacco-Vanzetti defense, writing occasional
articles, or helping at the New York end on matters of evidence
or fund-raising. Vanzetti’s strictures on the Soviet system from his

42 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

vantage point of philosophic anarchism were a painful embarrass-
ment, particularly since communists here and abroad were the most
active spokesmen for the case. In publicity material these views
of Vanzetti were carefully soft-pedaled, but in his voluminous
correspondence with sympathizers in all parts of the country he

did not conceal them. .

During the communist-led strike of textile woi kers m I as-
saic, New Jersey, I prepared and saw through publication a sensa-
tional brochure of pictures which I called Hell in New Jersey.
If I recall correctly, about one hundred and fifty thousand copies
were sold. I took part in the preliminary organization meetings
that led to the launching of the New Masses , contributed random
pieces to many of the Left magazines, and for some months con-
ducted a tri-weekly column of comment and satire in the Daily
Worker.

That my political orthodoxy left much to be desired may be sur-
mised from my experiences with the last-named enterprise. Since
I rarely went to the editorial offices, merely sending my con-
tributions by mail or messenger, I did not realize that my column
had brewed a tempest in the teapot there. I tried in the column
to provide a leaven of humor and light-hearted irony for the
dough of class-war news and “theses” in the Daily Worker. I
packed my space with frivolous jingles, skits on people and events,
now and then more serious divertissement — but often on subjects
remotely if at all related to the revolution. Just where and how
I offended the communist proprieties, I was never to discover.
But I did discover that my column was being furiously attacked
and defended. It threatened schism in the editorial ranks. In the
interests of unity and peace, I promptly quit my short-lived role
as columnist.

3

By 1926, the repercussions of the Communist Party struggle
in Russia, with Stalin and Trotsky as the principal adversaries,
were being felt in America. Many of the Russians arriving in the
United States on commercial and other missions, it became evi-
dent, were thus being shunted from the Soviet arena by Stalin’s
party machine under guise of important foreign assignments. Our
Tass dispatches were being minutely scrutinized on the other side

WORKING FOR THE SOVIETS 43

for symptoms of partisanship. In the ranks of American com-
munism, too, leaders and would-be leaders were choosing sides.

On the whole sentiment among American communists, as among
communists everywhere outside the Soviet Union, was prepon-
derantly for Trotsky, Zinoviev, Preobrazhensky and the rest of
the “Old Guard.” The romantic period of the Russian revolu-
tion may have become a faint memory at home, where the strident
prose of practical problems and sacrifices drowned out the poetry
of revolt. Abroad, the romantic period persisted, though in a
twilight haze — in a sense it is still alive — and the great names of
1917 and 1918 were still magical. The name of Trotsky, in par-
ticular, still connoted all the thrill and throb of the revolutionary
honeymoon. Many of the Americans now in the camp of Stalin
jeered at him as long as Trotsky and Zinoviev still seemed to have
a chance of winning out. Their present ardor is part of the penance
for having bet on the wrong horse at that time.

The will to power is sometimes incredible and a little ludicrous
to people who do not possess it to any marked degree. It creates
dynastic struggles for the leadership of lodge Number 2387 in
some absurd fraternal order or for the chairmanship of some
women’s club. The nail-and-claw struggles for leadership and
influence in the American communist movement, as I watched
them here and later from Moscow, seemed to me to be touched
with the spirit of of era bouffe . The movement which these people
sought to dominate was so small, persecuted, impotent as yet that
leadership offered at best larger opportunities for abuse and im-
prisonment. The spoils of victory were so meager in proportion
to the bitterness and vigor of the struggle. Yet men and women,
impelled to the radical way of life by their thirst for justice, sus-
pended ideals, and elementary decencies, in an unprincipled scram-
ble for control of the party machinery. They played low politics.
They flattered those who were on top. They lied to themselves,
to their followers, and particularly to the arbiters of their party
destinies in Moscow, in a frantic determination to win at any
price.

There is always, of course, an element of economic necessity
in such a struggle. Shriveled and juiceless as its plums may be,
political victory does mean a place on the payroll as editors, lec-
turers, officials, writers for people who have perhaps sacrificed their

PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

44

possibilities of earning a living in the capitalist set-up. It may mean
jobs at Moscow headquarters of the Comintern or the Profintern.

The so-called “professional revolutionist” has been glorified by
Lenin, who considered the overturn of an established order a full-
time job and career enough for any one lifetime. Perhaps he was
right. His view is shared, curiously, by the most conservative labor
spokesmen who favor “professional trade-union leaders,” and in
both cases the counsel may be that of practical necessity. Certain
it is that the professional revolutionist is in a most ambiguous
position psychologically when an internal fight develops in his
particular party. However earnest and high-minded he may be
in his stand on the principles and policies at issue, his livelihood,
too, is at stake. Such practical compulsions were operative at the
heart of the American extension of the Trotsky-Stalin fight, un-
avoidably, and were surely influential in driving many leaders
into the camp of Stalin as his triumph over Trotsky became more
assured.

But overshadowing such personal motives was the genuine
anxiety to keep the revolutionary regime in Russia and the inter-
national communist movement intact. The rank-and-file members,
especially, watched in mounting panic a clash which threatened to
pull down the whole Soviet structure. To prevent that disaster
they rallied to Stalin as they would have rallied to anyone who
retained control of the Kremlin, the party machinery, the func-
tioning state. Right or wrong, Trotsky meant schism, a communist
movement minus the first communist state.

Even we who worked by his side in the same narrow offices —
by this time under the roof of the Associated Press — could not
guess where Durands personal sympathies lay in the fight. Perhaps
he had none, because his basic loyalties were to the Soviet system
of power as such, regardless who might seize control of its in-
strumentalities. The fact that Jacob Doletzky, the Tass chief in
Moscow, was a Stalinist machine politician very early tinged our
work with a faint anti-Trotskyist color.* The further fact that the
American communists were so strongly Trotskyist tended, if any-
thing, to deepen that tinge — between our office and the American

* In 1937, strangely enough, Doletzky was arrested as an alleged Trotskyist,
and attempted suicide.

WORKING FOR THE SOVIETS 45

communists there was always a tension at times amounting to a
feud.

When the die was cast, however, and the Trotsky group in-
dubitably defeated, our office instantly became a Stalinist fortress.
Durant’s flare for smelling out heresy had new scope. Not only
renegades in relation to Russia as a whole, but deviationists from
Stalin’s “line” now engaged his talents. He scrutinized dispatches
from Moscow for traces of pro-Trotsky bias and called such hor-
rors to the attention of the American editorial headquarters in-
volved. Anyone who spared a counter-revolutionary sigh over
the fallen leaders, or suggested that the victors’ tactics were in any
wise questionable, instantly became an enemy to be crushed.

In the atmosphere of the Tass office, I sided automatically with
the victorious faction. I could not in my heart, however, think
of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek and others who had been glamorous
symbols of a new world in my most impressionable years, as
enemies of the revolution. The secret margin of sorrow over their
fate gave me a gnawing sensation of sinfulness in the presence of
Kenneth’s cold, implacable orthodoxy. Nor was I alone in my
clandestine grief. Others around me carried a hidden hurt while
we denounced the fallen idols in the name of discipline and unity.

4

In August, 1927, it was my professional duty to report in cable
dispatches the tragic climax of the Sacco- Vanzetti case. Russia fol-
lowed the details of the impending executions more anxiously than
any other nation and we were under instructions to report every
move. There was the tense night of August 10th, when the doomed
men were prepared for death, while the rotund, smiling Governor
Fuller of Massachusetts considered the plea for a reprieve. Hour
after hour I hovered over the Associated Press wires. By eleven
p.m. — one hour before the scheduled electrocutions — he was still
withholding his decision 3 he was squeezing the last drop of sadistic
relish out of his cat-and-mouse game while the whole world
looked on in horror.

In a daze I typed out two messages ready for “flashing” to
Moscow: “sacco dead” — “vanzetti dead.” These were not names
in the headlines 3 in a deep sense they were members of my fam-

46 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

ily, but close as few blood relations can be. At 11:24— thirty-six
minutes before the hour set for the official killings Fuller an-
nounced a twelve days’ reprieve.

Then came the day and the night of August 22. In my memory
they have a nightmare quality. My role was so gruesomely routine
—the preparation of “flash” cables, the vigil at the A.P. wires,
the filling in of the exact minute of Sacco’s death, then of Van-
zetti’s death— all so businesslike. . . . The case which was in-
tegrated with my own existence, intimate as few things in life
ever become intimate, was over, finished. Nothing to do but go
home to bed ... I remember wondering why I could not weep
and shriek with the hurt of it, just as I was to wonder seven years
later at my father’s coffin.

A few weeks later I shut myself into a room at Kenneth
Durant’s home for privacy, day after day for over two weeks,
and wrote the story of two simple peasant boys, born in Italy
to die in America in full view of all the nations on the globe.
Or rather, the book wrote itself. Leafing through The Life and
Death of Sacco and Vmzetti , I am astonished to find passages
so eloquent in their passionate restraint that they seem to have
been written by another person. At points in the terse narrative
I find a poetic vein that transcends my normal literary powers.
It was the alchemy of feelings too deep for tears precipitating a
style of their own. Except for minor editorial revisions, my first
draft, copied by Margaret Larkin, went to the printers. The book
was subsequently translated into German, Italian, Russian and
Yiddish and widely read in those languages. Two Russian edi-
tions, published while I was in Moscow, sold some 130,000 copies.
Only the original English version never reached more than a
few thousand readers. In 1933, the Nazis paid the book the com-
pliment of immolation on their funeral pyre to German culture.
It burned in as fine a literary company as was ever assembled out-
side a library.

5

I had met a number of United Press officials while Tass operated
from their headquarters on Park Row. The President of the
United Press, Karl A. Bickel, was on the friendliest terms with
Durant and greatly impressed with his political perspicacity and

WORKING FOR THE SOVIETS 47

journalistic talents. In anything touching Russia, Bickel usually
consulted Durant. In 1926 the post of Moscow correspondent fell
vacant. Aware of my fervent hope of getting to the Soviet land,
Durant suggested my name among others. The suggestion, I was
chagrined to learn after the event, had been seriously considered
but ultimately discarded.

When the post was again available, more than a year later,
Bickel revived the suggestion. Before offering me the job, how-
ever, he consulted Durant, who not only agreed but supported
the appointment in the warmest terms. He merely asked that I
remain with Tass until he returned from a trip to Russia for the
celebration of the tenth anniversary of the revolution. Bickel
acquiesced though it meant that his Moscow Bureau would re-
main with only a Russian woman secretary, a Miss Jmudskaya,
in charge.

Durant was away several months, during which I conducted
the American work of the Tass service, with Joe Freeman assist-
ing. Thousands of foreign sympathizers had gathered in Moscow
and Leningrad for the decennial festivities. Lenin had been over-
joyed when the Soviet regime lasted beyond the seventy-day
record of the only other proletarian government in history, the
Paris Commune. And now the revolution had endured an entire
decade! The thrill of that achievement — of mere survival! — could
be felt right around the world. Even embittered foes of the Soviet
idea felt the importance of the historic moment. Though a large
section of that decade had been wasted on costly civil warfare
and in fighting off interventionists and economic strangle holds,
and in convalescing from a debilitating famine, the young state
had a great deal to show. The record of economic and cultural
reconstruction before 1928, exhibited with the Russian genius for
stage-setting in the celebration of November, 1927, made a most
impressive total.

In spirit we participated in the celebration. The press accounts
of the demonstrations and congresses and speeches and military
displays may have been merely picturesque to other Americans.
To those of us who regarded the Soviet land as our spiritual home,
these were things that lifted us to a rarefied altitude of joy. Only
the futile attempt of Trotsky and his followers to speak to the
Soviet masses above the heads of the victorious Stalinists marred

48 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW

the festivities. In the elation of the soaring moment it was easier
to brush such annoyances aside than to think them through.

The knowledge that in a few months I should be there, not
merely looking on but reporting what I saw to an audience of
a hundred million readers, colored this period of impatient wait-
ing with all the tints of impending excitement.

Durant’s eye-witness report on his return heightened my ex-
pectancy. He had been not only in the capital and in Leningrad
but in Soviet Karelia. Everywhere he found the reigning pro-
letariat joyous, enthusiastic, perhaps a little bewildered by its
unaccustomed glory and freedom, but adjusting itself to its new
dignity. I recall his description of the anniversary demonstration
on Red Square as Ernestine Evans, Billy, and several others of
us drank Chianti at a little Italian restaurant in Greenwich Vil-
lage. Through his eyes we saw the Caucasian horsemen dashing
across the square, the massed banners, the flood of exultant work-
ers, and our own romantic and too willing imaginations added
high colors to the recital. He told a few touching homely anec-
dotes of lowly peasants and workmen whose eyes were still blinded
by the incandescence of the revolution.

“God! Those are the things I want to write when I get there!”
I exclaimed. “How do the other correspondents fail to report such
things? They’re worth tons of statistics!”

If anyone ever went to the Soviet realm with a deep and earnest
determination to understand the revolution, to slough off petty
detail and dig down to the hard, enduring core of a great event
in human history, it was the newly appointed United Press corre-
spondent. My problem, I felt, would be to tone down the rhap-
sody to the humdrum level of American journalism. I was not
deserting the direct service of the cause for the fleshpots of
capitalism. (The United Press, as a matter of fact, was paying
me only a few dollars more than Tass.) I was accepting, rather,
a post of immense strategic importance in the further service
of that cause, and doing so with the whole-hearted agreement
and understanding of my chiefs in Tass and therefore, presumably,
of the Soviet Foreign Office.

If I was aware of a congenital ineptitude for fanaticism, it was
a secret and guilty awareness. I reckoned it a serious flaw in
my nature, a lurking enemy who must be shown no indulgences.

WORKING FOR THE SOVIETS

49

Mine are the faults, I explained to myself, of a too idealistic radi-
cal education, an abstract idealism too frail for the storms of a
real revolution.

“I shall not pander to these weaknesses! Truth,” I told my-
self, “does not consist of so-called facts. A picture may be ‘true’ in
detail yet compose into a nightmare lie in its totality. My task
is to devote myself to the underlying truths rather than the sur-
face facts. Mine must be the larger objectivity of history in the
making”

The farewell party arranged by my friends included the cream
of the communist intelligentsia, with not a deviationist in the
company. They were sending off one of their very own, proudly
aware of his determination to use the opportunity for spreading
the gospel whose fountainhead was in the Kremlin.

The following evening, December 31, 1927, on New Year’s
Eve, I sailed with Billy and our five-year-old daughter, Eugenie,
for the land of our dreams.

BOOK 2

HALLELUJAH!

I. Moscow and Muscovites

THE red stars, with their insignia of crossed hammer and sickle,
brought poignant confirmation that we were at last and indubitably
in the land of proletarian dictatorship. They seemed to glow
on the peaked caps of the Red soldiers with an inner light of
their own, in the deepening twilight of our railroad coach. They
shed an aura of intimacy and authenticated, in the mysterious
language of symbols, the revolution and everything it stood for
in our minds. After a life-time in which established authority is
synonymous with reaction and exploitation, the flesh-and-blood
vision of a communist soldier or a communist policeman verges on
the miraculous.

The train had paused under a wooden arch inscribed “Workers
of the World, Unite!” precisely as in the photographs I had once
published in Soviet Russia Pictorial . The Polish officers in their
comic-opera uniforms and dragging swords and provincial fop-
pishness had stepped off, and the Red soldiers boarded. They
wore greatcoats that reached the floor, snow-flakes clung to their
homey peasant faces, and the red stars, perhaps reflecting our
ardor, shed an effulgence over their features. We tried our first
words of Russian as we handed over our passports. “Good eve-
ning, tovarishchi we said, relishing the word — “comrades” — and
the familiarity it implied.

The soldiers saluted and smiled faintly. They met the faith-
ful arriving tremulously day after day and were possibly a bit
bored with the performance.

As we chugged into the frontier station, Negoreloye, night fell
suddenly, like the angry closing of shutters overhead. Sullen-
looking porters, grimy burlap aprons over their padded coats,
took our baggage to the customs house. We followed into the
snow and the cold. The customs house at that time was a dingy,
dimly-lit barn of a place, the more cheerless in contrast with the

53

54 HALLELUJAH !

clean concrete structure we had left a little earlier at Stolpce,
on the Polish side.

Neither a forlorn-looking station nor cold nor darkness coiud
douse our high mood of expectation. More than the returning
Russians, apparently, we felt this moment as a homecoming. Else-
where dinginess might be depressing. Here it seemed to us ro-
mantically proletarian, without stupid bourgeois frills and preten-
sions, in the revolutionary tradition of gloom and starkness. T. he
sound of Russian spoken around us seemed in itself worth the
journey. The presence of Lenin, Stalin, Rykov, ^ and Kalinin in
framed lithographs on the walls made this melancholy place one
in spirit with all the radical headquarters and meeting halls in
my memory.

The thrill of finding one’s private, esoteric symbols installed
in the role of authority!

On the train next morning I was up and dressed soon after
dawn, impatient to see the Russian land jog by. I was fearful
of missing something, anxious to soak up impressions, to absorb
a new world. Peering through the swirling curtains of snow, I
saw only a montonously flat white landscape, occasional huts half
buried in snow, now and then a huddled peasant driving a sleigh.
At stations, gray, grotesquely bundled figures moved about, ex-
haling great clouds of visible breath, stopping to wipe icicles from
bearded faces with their coat sleeves. Slovenly women in patched
coats, felt boots and thick head-shawls offered roasted chicken,
hard-boiled eggs, and pickled cucumbers with filthy fingers. Third-
class passengers filled their tea-kettles with boiling water from the
station samovars and rushed back to their cars, pursued by the
biting winds. Our porter served us tea in glasses and zwieback.
He shrugged his shoulders helplessly when I tested a few phrases
from my Russian primer on him. Either the primer or I were
mistaken, and in either case the illusion that I had made con-
siderable progress in the language since leaving New York was
punctured.

Toward noon, on February 8, 1928, we reached Moscow.

There is no human creature more helpless than a foreigner
arriving in the Soviet capital for the first time. But Louis Fischer

* Imprisoned in 1937.

MOSCOW AND MUSCOVITES 55

and my Russian secretary, Miss Jmudskaya, met us at Alexan-
drovsky Station and took control of our destinies. They packed
the Lyons family and its baggage and themselves into a dilapi-
dated Ford, which burrowed its way noisily through the snow and
deposited us at the door of the Grand Hotel — the not-so-Grand
Hotel I was to re-christen it privately soon.

My cramped position in the car had shut out the view of the
streets and I felt cheated of the first glimpse of the city to which
I was entitled. The next few weeks, indeed, were filled with
snowstorms and intense cold and disturbing incidents that hid the
city from my sight and deepened a curious and almost panicky
sense of bafflement that I did not quite shake off for months.
“Bewilderment” was the word that I used most often in my first
letters home.

Not until we were settled in a large room on the fifth floor
of the hotel, eating sturgeon and black bread and receiving lacka-
daisical answers from Miss Jmudskaya to our fumbling questions,
did I realize the peculiar difficulties of my situation. Here I was
in a strange land, with scarcely a word of its language, with the
care of a wife and five-year-old child on my conscience, not a
penny in the bank, and full responsibility for the news of a vast,
mysterious country on my shoulders. The mood of romantic an-
ticipation resolved for the moment into a thousand formidable
immediate problems, ranging from milk for Genie to news sources
for the United Press. The bill for our modest repast when it ar-
rived, did little to brighten the picture.

“There must be some mistake,” I insisted.

She studied the reckoning through her pince-nez.

“No, it’s right, quite right. Prices are high here and going
higher every day. ...”

“But a full meal and champagne at the Ritz-Carlton would
have cost me less!”

Miss Jmudskaya shrugged her shoulders. She had been through
the civil wars as a young girl. She had shifted for herself all these
years, despite her near-sighted, school-teacherish appearance. She
had searched for her mother for six or seven years, then run
into her accidentally on a Leningrad street one day when the
search had been abandoned as hopeless. Neither now nor ever
after could my worries or excitements perturb her.

^6 hallelujah!

“At this rate,” I said, “my salary won’t half cover the cost of
eats alone.”

“You don’t have to eat at the hotel,” she consoled me. “I’ll
show Mrs. Lyons where to shop— things are much cheaper in the
markets. I suppose you brought an electric cook-stove and uten-
sils? . . . Well, you will borrow one from some of the Ameri-
cans. Of course, it’s against the rules to cook in the hotel rooms,
but that’s all right.”

Miss Jmudskaya’s nasal voice was as monotonous as a high-
pitched buzz-saw. In the two years that she worked with me, I
never once heard that voice touched with enthusiasm or even bit-
terness. I was to meet hundreds like her, in whom suffering
seemed to have burned out all emotion. Only the charred husks
of their character remained.

2

She steered me a little later through the blinding snows along
zigzagging streets to the Foreign Office building on Vorovsky
Square. I waited while she negotiated a permit— a fropmk: the
word that looms gigantic on Russia’s horizon. It allowed me to
enter the musty old building, to follow my secretary through a
maze of dark corridors, and finally to meet the censors. These cor-
ridors and the censors themselves were to remain among the focal
points of my existence for six years. I came to know their idiosyn-
crasies and sharp windings as an Indian runner knows his trails.

A podgy little intellectual, bearded and shrill and full of
words, was the head of the Press Department: Theodore Roth-
stein. He was genial and clearly desirous of setting me at ease.
I would soon learn the ropes, he assured me, and his department
existed only to assist the correspondents in everything. It cen-
sored dispatches only pro forma and largely to safeguard us
against falsehoods and malicious rumors. My fame had preceded
me, I gathered, and as a “sympathetic” and “friendly” corre-
spondent I was counted upon to hew close to the line of official
information, avoiding the temptation to sensationalize or to be-
lieve malign libels.

That suited me perfectly. Indeed, I was impatient to begin
to serve. When, for instance, could I see President Kalinin? There

MOSCOW AND MUSCOVITES 57

•was so much fantastic exaggeration about peasant recalcitrance in
the foreign press these days. I meant to counteract it, and an in-
terview with the homespun peasant President should do the trick
effectively.

Mr. Rothstein, however, was shocked. He shook his beard
reproachfully and marveled at the temerity of Americans.

“Mr. Lyons,” he asked in a hurt voice, “would a foreign corre-
spondent arriving in Washington, let us say, have the nerve to ask
to see President Coolidge? Yet as soon as you fellows arrive in
Moscow — ”

“But, Comrade Rothstein, a correspondent in Washington would
see the President as a matter of course at press conferences twice
a week and would be allowed to ask questions. What’s more, he
would see the Secretary of State usually every day, and other
Cabinet members almost as often as he wished.”

The little man’s astonishment was boundless. Though he had
lived a large part of his life in England, officialdom remained
for him, as for all Russians, a race apart behind the barbed-wire
of inaccessibility. The Asiatic ritual of mystification around high
personages, inherited from tsardom, was complicated by a strange
touchiness. The newly powerful, like the newly rich, are on
the alert against any slight to their dignity.

Mr. Rothstein’s first assistant was no less cordial. Jacob Podol-
sky, his head as bald as an egg and his chin decorated with a
square black beard, looked a little like an Assyrian priest come
to life; he was full of good-natured cynicisms and laughed easily,
though most non-committally. My eagerness to do justice to the
Soviet Union — the facts that I meant to collate and the people
whom I meant to interview and the American misconceptions about
the revolution that I meant to dissipate — either amused or em-
barrassed him, I am not sure which. It surely amused Mironov,
a sour, phlegmatic man whose large hooked nose all but met
his chin when he frowned— and even his smile was a frown. His
sarcastic expression, as nearly as I could decipher it, said, “Huh
. . . another ignorant American on my poor head . . . and the
difficult kind at that — an idealist!”

The head of the censorship division was replaced several times
during my Moscow years, but Podolsky * and Mironov * were to
remain there always, like fixed stars in our professional firmament.

* Arrested and exiled in the 1937 purge.

58 hallelujah!

The years did nothing to alter the non-committal laughter of the
one and the sarcastic frown of the other. The stirring or tragic
events that passed in review under their official blue pencils rarely
fluttered their resigned boredom.

Returning from the Foreign Office, I stopped to lace my shoe
just as we were passing a large, square, rococo building. Instantly
two soldiers with fixed bayonets rushed at me. Miss Jmudskaya’s
hurried explanation saved me from being gored. It appeared that
I had picked the G.P.U. headquarters, of all places, to pause
at, and that such a procedure was fraught with danger. Later I
found that many Muscovites made a detour to avoid passing that
segment of innocent-looking sidewalk.

In the evening I trudged through the snowstorm from the
hotel uphill on Tverskaya, in the company of a gifted American
cartoonist, William Gropper. The cobbled street and broken side-
walks were treacherous under tight-packed snow. Ghostly frost-
covered trolley cars crawled close to the curb. At every step we
were accosted by women, in high felt boots, their heads wrapped
in thick shawls, their faces glowing with the cold, cigarettes
smoldering between painted lips. Several of them pulled our coat-
tails and tried a few words of pidgin English on us. A few well-
stocked shop windows seemed ill at ease in their embarrassing pros-
perity among the dusty windows filled with debris and emptiness.
The strumming of a guitar reached us from some basement restau-
rant. The sing-song of a persistent beggar clung to our heels. Bun-
dled-up droshky drivers, their beards streaked with frost and icicles
clinging to their nostrils, sat in front of miniature sleds. One or
two of them whipped disconsolate horses into action and followed
us half-heartedly. ...

That first day in Moscow remains with me in minutest de-
tail, something mounted and fixed like a scaled model, which I
can draw out and study at will. A special permit to enter a public
building, alarmed soldiers if you paused at the wrong spot on a
city sidewalk: the sense of being in a city besieged and closely
guarded, which was to recur to me throughout my long resi-
dence in Russia, was born on this day.

Prostitutes, beggars, food difficulties: I had known these things
existed and was prepared to confront them. I was fully aware
that Russia in 1928 was far from socialism and that it contended

MOSCOW AND MUSCOVITES 59

with many of the evils of other lands and some of its own. In
my romantic heart, however, I had not quite credited this knowl-
edge. The tangible evidences had to be assimilated.

3

The physical Moscow began to fall into focus. After the first
confusion, the pattern of the city emerges: the walled-in Kremlin
on whose eastern flank is the spacious Red Square; a second
crenelated old wall enclosing Kitai Gorod, the so-called Chinese
City in which there are no Chinese; beyond that two concentric
rings of wide boulevards, A and B; and outside the B ring, the
spreading city encroaching far into the farm and forest lands.

Broad avenues radiate spokewise from the center and form im-
portant squares where they cut across the boulevards. Theoretically
straight, these avenues have a wayward manner of changing course
unexpectedly or narrowing sharply for no reason, as though tired
of the outlandish efficiency. Within the neat design of avenues
and boulevards is the maze of side-streets, narrow, tortuous, often
turning snakelike on themselves, and a mystery even to old Mus-
covites. The serpentine Moscow River, always intruding where
it is least expected, adds to the tangle.

Russians used to call Moscow the largest village in their land.
Despite several “skyscrapers,” the tallest of them twelve stories, it
was still a straggling, meandering place, and its utterly Eastern
character rather astonished me. Moscow is Asiatic in its sprawling
chaos, its squat houses, its quaint old churches, and profusion of
colored cupolas. The strongly Mongoloid faces everywhere, the
fantastic rags of the beggars, and the makeshift garments of the
majority of the population underlined this un-European appear-
ance. Gliding along at night noiselessly in a diminutive sleigh
through the labyrinth of alleys, every turn of the street revealing
a new roof-line like quaint Arabic script against the sky, I often
had a powerful sense of nearness to the Orient.

Winter is the most difficult time for a newcomer to adjust him-
self to the Soviet capital. The intense cold, frequent blizzards
and snowstorms, and the night that comes so soon after noon
make it an aloof and forbidding place. For me, plunged at once
into the exacting business of gathering news, having it censored,

60 hallelujah!

and filing it at the telegraph office, the adjustment was that much
more difficult.

And yet, I am pleased that I came upon Moscow in its winter
character, because that, I was to realize, it its true inner nature,
dark, huddled, blanketed in snow, its nose stuck into a voluminous
sheepskin coat against the crisp cold. A city accustomed through
all its centuries to the inclemency of nature, the mystery of brief
days and interminable night. A city, above all, with an eerie
beauty of ghostlike houses, skeleton trees and hushed, hurrying
people, hidden deep within their patched and padded garments.
Foreign tourists who visit Moscow only in its brief dusty sum-
mer incarnation never come near the essence of the place.

We were taken to the Dom Gertzena (Herzen House), a club
for writers, where carefree and high-pitched literary bohemianism
was making its last stand. Soon enough this bohemianism was
to be wiped out by the new policies of an embattled Kremlin in-
tent on industrializing and socializing the country, wiped out along
with the cafes, the dance halls, gypsy music, jazz, fun-for-fun’s-
sake, and all other forms of “bourgeois decadence.” Already fin-
gers of gloom touched the life of Dom Gertzena — the Ncp holi-
day was nearly over. A fierce proletarian Puritanism was in the
offing.

But the irrepressible Pava was still there, darkly handsome,
banging the piano, hammering with fists in sheer overflow of
spirits and singing lustily. We got to know her and love her in
the years that followed. Long-haired writers of an older vintage
were there, and young poets swaggering in the apache proletarian
manner of Mayakovsky, Russian newspapermen escorting ballet
girls, and lordly G.P.U. officers. Food was still plentiful, though
costly, and the feasting did not reach its height until after mid-
night. Billy, contributing an American song occasionally to the
festivities, instantly became a favorite in those precincts. Some of
the writers, journalists, and actors took us in on a comradely basis
as few other foreign correspondents, probably, had been accepted
before.

Russians are a gregarious folk. Until food stringency and grow-
ing political fears put a damper on such things, Moscow was a city
of endless parties. We were fortunate in reaching the country just
before this intense social life was snuffed out. There was scarcely

MOSCOW AND MUSCOVITES

6l

a week in the early months o£ 1928 when we did not participate
in a few house parties in the one- or two-room “apartments” of
Soviet writers, technicians, officials, workers.

The procedure was always in the routine of Russian tradi-
tion. The guests sat close-packed around a large table, literally
for hours, consuming vodka and zakusky , drinking toasts to the
host, the hostess, the hostess’s blue eyes, the guests en masse and
one by one, everyone getting a little more flushed and a lot louder
as we proceeded. Then, if the home boasted an old horned gramo-
phone and a few cracked records, a space was cleared for danc-
ing. If there was a piano, it became the center of a spontaneous
choir, singing old folk songs and the brave new hymns and
marching songs of the revolution ; or, most frequently, the old
tunes with Soviet words. Occasionally someone brought a seven-
stringed guitar or an accordion to enliven the gathering, and
Billy’s “uke” was in great demand.

I accepted more such invitations, no doubt, than were strictly
good for me, in an insatiable thirst for meeting more and still
more Russians, identifying myself a little more closely if pos-
sible with their ways and their problems. I prowled in their com-
mon kitchens, peeped shamelessly into neighboring “apartments”
in the common corridor, and tried to steep myself in the Rus-
sian atmosphere.

Sometimes a group of us capped a night’s festivities with a
visit to some beer hall on the Arbat, a gypsy restaurant on the
Tverskaya, Dorn Gertzena, the Artists’ Club or a cooperative cafe.
Whatever the hour, we found these resorts crowded and filled
with noise and smoke. I instigated these excursions light-mindedly.
I did not as yet realize that I was compromising those Russians
whom I inveigled into appearing in public in a foreigner’s com-
pany.

At our first Foreign Office reception for the correspondents’
corps, we became acquainted with the Soviet newspaper fraternity.
A few of these men we came to value in the following years. I
remember the gathering particularly because there was a cama-
raderie between the native and foreign newspapermen never again
repeated.

At the home of Comrade Yonov,* head of a publishing trust

* Arrested and exiled in 1936.

62 hallelujah!

and brother-in-law to Zinoviev, we met a few Kremlin officials,
painters and authors, several of whom remained our friends,
within the narrow limits of discretion in the suspicious years to
follow. Yonov, whom we had met in New York, was a bibliophile
and a man of cultivated taste generally. He exhibited rare first
editions and spoke fervently of the fine printing his organization
was doing. To his typographical tastes the Soviet Union owes those
lovely Academia editions of the Arabian Nights and other classics
known to book collectors the world over.

In the “salon” of Rachelle Ossipovna, we found a congregation
of artists and near-artists, opera and ballet hopefuls, and the slim
young men for whom the hostess had a sweet-tooth. Elsewhere I
met the irrepressible Sergei Trivas,* whose job it was to enter-
tain visiting Americans and Englishmen. He headed the Anglo-
American Department of Voks (the Society for Cultural Relations
with Foreign Countries). He made no secret of his service in the
G.P.U. But if he started to cultivate me in the line of duty, he
came in time, I like to believe, to relish that duty, if only be-
cause he found me a sympathetic listener to whom he could safely
confide his hopes and boast of his amorous escapades.

And thus, through a hundred different contacts and accidental
meetings, we added to our acquaintances minor officials, simple
factory workers, office clerks, students, and particularly, as was
only natural, intellectuals of both the pre-revolutionary and the
new generation. We learned to drain wine glasses while someone
sang a charockha and the company clapped hands and chanted,
“Pyei do dna y fyei do dm!” (“Drink to the bottom”) at the
top of its lusty voice. We learned to join in the choruses of all
the songs. We acquired a few words of mispronounced Russian.
Above all, we learned not to talk politics, domestic or interna-
tional, but to stick close to safe subjects like the theater, the new
ballerina, the weather, and the relative virtues of the Caucasus and
the Crimea as vacation resorts. On days when some startling de-
cree or other news sensation filled the press and without doubt
filled everyone’s mind as well, no one referred to it at social occa-
sions. Discretion had been hammered home by experience.

Our presence both attracted other guests and made them a little

* Executed in 1930.

MOSCOW AND MUSCOVITES 63

jumpy — the blend of fear and fascination, traditional hospitality
and distrust of a stranger which made up the ordinary Russian’s
attitude to a foreigner. We discovered that Americans, in particu-
lar, were infinitely fascinating to Russians. For the older genera-
tion nurtured on democratic hopes, America was the land of vast
freedoms and individual opportunities. For the younger people,
thrilling to the vision of an industrialized future, it was the land
of marvelous technique.

“Fordization” was a magic word just then in Russia, seeing
mirages of mass production in its desert of goods shortages. How
amazed the Sage of Dearborn would be, I often thought, to realize
that he occupied a prominent niche in every young communist’s
private pantheon. An American intellectual, distrusting the belt
system of production as a new species of exploitation, did not al-
ways find it easy to share Soviet enthusiasm for miracle-working
Fordization.

America to the ordinary Russian meant roughly anything west
of the Atlantic. More than once someone said hopefully, “Oh,
you’re from America! Maybe you know my brother in Rio de
Janeiro!”

4

I took in the Russian theater, ballet and opera in great draughts.
Ardently if illogically, I gave the revolution credit for everything
cultural that it had inherited from the tsarist era. A hundred years
of classical ballet, the meticulous art of Stanislavsky’s theaters,
the piled-up treasures of Russian music and stagecraft were for
me, as for all foreign worshippers, subtle confirmation of Karl
Marx’s theories. Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky, Moskvin and Ma-
dame Geltzer have made more converts to Sovietism among visit-
ing outsiders than the marvels of the Five Year Plan or the
adroitness of the guides.

The comparative tolerance of the “Nep” period had invigorated
the Soviet theater. With few exceptions the finest things in post-
revolutionary Russian drama, cinema and dance belonged to that
time: Eisenstein’s and Pudovkin’s best motion pictures, Bulgakov’s
and Olesha’s best plays, the ballet Red Pofify, the superb stylized
productions by Granovsky in the Jewish Kamerny Theatre, the
sensational innovations of Vsevelod Meierhold and a hundred other

64 HALLELUJAH !

achievements. It is largely upon these that the new Russia’s glamor-
ous reputation in the theater and cinema still rests. Some of them
were robust enough to weather the stormy years that followed.

In the theater, the people on my side of the footlights interested
me even more than those on the stage. Russian dramatic art is
old; even Meierhold did most of his pioneering before the revo-
lution. The audiences were new. Those citadels of snobbery in
all lands, ballet and opera, had fallen to the masses. Working
men and women thronged not only the music halls and moving
picture houses, but the finest dramatic theaters. High admission
prices (even with the reductions to trade-union members) still
barred the lowest categories of labor from some of the theaters.
Nevertheless, the greater part of these audiences would have gone
through life without seeing a first-rate play, let alone a ballet or
opera, had it not been for the revolution. The description of a
working woman in head-kerchief, perhaps a servant or sewing-
machine worker, sitting at ease in the Imperial Box at the Bolshoi
Theater has become a cliche of Soviet travel books. There was
nothing stereotyped, though, in the emotional lift I got out of
such sights.

Whether in the theater or out of it, these audiences and their
life provided me with continuous stimulation. Their existence
seemed to me pitched on a higher plane of intensity, in which joys
and sorrows alike were sharper and more meaningful. Elsewhere
poverty and wealth, hope and despair, were the commonplaces of
old social systems and of direct interest only to the individuals
affected. Here, where the revolution had destroyed old relations
and established a new set of social values the lot of the individ-
ual, whether pleasant or horrible, seemed novel, transitional and
historically important. Or so it seemed to me, studying Russians
avidly in the light of my socialist convictions.

Elsewhere men, women and children had private existences
distinct from their social status. Here they epitomized for me
classes and groups: Soviet Youth, Backward Peasants, Bourgeois
Intellectuals, Class-Conscious Workers, Bureaucrats, and so on.
They were thus capitalized in my eyes as I watched them on the
streets, at social gatherings, in restaurants, offices, factories. It
was largely my own mind which gave them this rich social coloring.

MOSCOW AND MUSCOVITES 65

It turned all of Russia for me — throughout my six years, because
the novelty never wore off entirely — into a moving spectacle.

A prying curiosity took me to churches, markets, homes, nearby
villages, theater rehearsals — wherever, off the beaten tourist track
of factories and museums, I could see the people of the new Rus-
sia at their private preoccupations.

II. The Kremlin’s Guests and Poor Relations

WE SOON met most of the Americans with whom we were
to be in contact in the ensuing years. The attitude of the sea-
soned Moscow reporters ranged from frank pity for my innocence
and ignorance to no less frank disdain for my imported en-
thusiasms. I was pulled up short by the discovery that journalists
who sounded so cocksure in their published eulogies of the Bol-
shevik world were less certain and less eulogistic in their un-
published views.

Those Soviet developments which loomed largest in their minds
and conversation at this juncture, I realized immediately, were
not mentioned in their dispatches or at most conveyed in hints.
The important things in Moscow are so often the intangibles—
atmospheric pressures, as it were — which cannot be captured in
news accounts. At the moment members of the press corps at all
sensitive to changes in political weather were aware of gather-
ing electrical storms — a tightening of the ranks of the ruling
minority, a tremor of apprehension in the mass of the popula-
tion. Casual table talk among the newspapermen treated as mat-
ters of common knowledge facts which I had vehemently denied
for so many years — facts for which I had helped consign friends
to the garbage-heap of “renegacy.”

The veteran Chicago 'Daily News man, Junius B. Wood, lived
at our hotel j a growling, sharp-toothed bear of a man, whose
redoubtable reputation and gruff ways rather intimidated a fledg-
ling correspondent. Only our daughter was not fooled by his
growl. He might be composing another biting commentary on
Soviet news when Genie strode in (Junius looked upon the “Krem-
lin gang 55 as just another set of politicians and treated their works
and professions as unceremoniously as though they were Tammany
stalwarts), but whatever devastating piece of realism he might
be inditing, it waited while he entertained the young lady by
playing the piano as she sat on the lid, her little legs dangling.

66

kremlin’s guests and poor relations 67

The American colony in Russia was destined to expand under
the first Five Year Plan into a heterogeneous mass of technicians,
skilled workers, salesmen, job-hunters, political quacks, amateur
journalists.. At its peak it was to provide fascinated Russians with
a goodly cross-section of America’s Main Street. At this point,
though, it was still a select company of accredited newspapermen,
pioneer businessmen, and a few concessionaires.

Among the newspapermen, Walter Duranty, a little English-
man who had been in the New York Times service since the war,
reigned supreme. Urbane, clever to a fault, a scintillating talker,
he remained, after all his years in Russia, detached from its life
and fate, curiously contemptuous of Russians. He spoke of Soviet
triumphs and travail much as he might of a murder mystery he
had read, but with not half the passion or sense of personal in-
volvement. His spoken views of the Russian scene, when the
mood was upon him, would have shocked New York radicals
who mistook him for a Soviet enthusiast, even as they shocked
me.

Among the concessionaires, the Hammer family, father, mother,
and sons, held first place. Drawn to Russia from New York
by their genuine interest in the revolution, the Hammers had
found it a fertile field for their commercial talents; they risked
their modest capital in the new Russia long before others ven-
tured it. First as foreign trade intermediaries, then as pencil
manufacturers on a concession basis, they mixed the business of
helping themselves with the pleasure of helping Russia. In a
great house on Sadovaya Kudrinskaya they dispensed hospitality
with a baronial hand.

A contingent of foreigners which had for me, as for all of Mos-
cow, a particular fascination was concentrated chiefly in the Met-
ropole Hotel. It consisted of refugees from the Chinese counter-
revolution. One of the most attractive of these refugees, an Ameri-
can girl named Rayna Prohme, had died suddenly in Moscow
a few months earlier and the legend of her remarkable person-
ality and tragic end was still fresh when I arrived. Vincent Sheean’s
Personal History stands as an inspired tribute to this red-headed
girl.

The soaring revolutionary hopes in China, fed by Kuomintang
victories under Soviet Russian guidance, had collapsed in gory

68 hallelujah!

tragedy. Sheean and others have given us vivid pictures of both
the victory and the defeat. Every radical and liberal had in some
measure lived and suffered that drama in his own heart. The
small company of refugees was therefore haloed by our mixed
feelings of pride and pathos.

There was Madam Sun Yat Sen, the widow of the revered
leader of modern China. She was a fragile, bird-like creature 5
exq uisi te in her native costume, its flowers touched by the sun-
light streaming into the hotel room, a little tremulous in her
shyness, she seemed a lovely animated Chinese figure. She rarely
ventured out of the hotel and saw few people outside of those who
had worked with her in China. But I met her several, times. It
seemed a little unreal and even disconcerting to find this delicate
little woman possessed of a sharp mind and robust character.

And there was Eugene Chen, who had been Foreign Minister
when the Chinese revolution was at its glowing apex. In his case,
too, a small physique somehow set off his vigorous mind dramati-
cally. He had been bom in Trinidad, in the West Indies, with a
considerable admixture of Negro in his blood. He had married a
handsome Negro woman — the children showed me photographs
of her — and she bore him two boys and two girls. They owned
land, were thoroughly British in their education, and might easily
have remained in Trinidad as typical humdrum natives of mixed
blood. But the Chinese heritage asserted itself. Chen traveled
to the land of his forebears and, without knowing its language, be-
came a leader in the revolutionary upsurge. His official notes and
manifestos as Foreign Minister were the delight of the radical
world. I found that he spoke as he wrote, with a diplomat’s care
for the meaning and an artist’s sensitiveness for the proper word.

Both Madam Sun and Mr. Chen soon left Moscow — she for
Shanghai, he for Paris. The four Chen children remained in Rus-
sia, learned Russian and made themselves part of the new sur-
roundings. We came to know them intimately and to admire them
for their charms and their talents. All four ultimately married
Russians. The historical fate which linked China and Russia for
a few years and may again link them in the future is curiously
personified in these four born in Trinidad, educated in Eng-
land, touched in China by a new faith that came to flower in
Russia.

kremlin’s guests and poor relations 69

2

Then, as now, there were two foreign colonies in Russia and
they rarely met. One was “bourgeois,” and its center was in the
expensive hotels, the embassies and legations, and relatively com-
fortable private apartments. The other was communist, and its
center was at the Lux Hotel set aside for the use of foreign Bol-
sheviks, at the offices of various Red Internationals, and in the
communist schools. Both colonies were suspect, for to the Soviet
mind an outsider, whatever his politics, is an alien creature of
curious habits and unstable faith. The bourgeois group was openly
under surveillance. The visiting brethren of the faith were watched
less candidly but more minutely. I know no American who has
succeeded in making himself a part of both those colonies.

My natural impulse was toward the communist colony, of
course. I knew most of the permanent American representatives in
the Communist International, the Red Trade Union International,
and other organizations. A few of them had been friends and
frequently guests at my home in Sunnyside, Long Island. I had
expected confidently that my Moscow friends and political guid-
ance would come from that direction. If I experienced any sense
of intrusion or self-consciousness over a false position, it was,
rather, in the company of the capitalist newspapermen and other
denizens of the bourgeois American camp.

Until we were politely but unequivocally excluded from its
sourish precincts, Billy and I were therefore constant visitors at
the Lux Hotel, on the Tverskaya, in the crowded room of one
or another American communist. A few Russian functionaries, in
need of “living space” and influential enough to wangle this privi-
lege, had also obtained temporary quarters in the Lux. Among
them was Constantine Umansky, for many years my long-distance
co-worker in Tass. We called on him, too, when in the building.

How were we to guess that in crossing the Soviet frontier, even
before I had written a single heretical line or voiced a single un-
orthodox sentiment, we had been turned mysteriously into un-
touchables? How were we to surmise that in visiting old friends
we were exposing them to capitalist contagions and, what is more
to the point, endangering the most valuable asset in their political

70 HALLELUJAH !

climbing— their spotless orthodoxy? All unaware of our new dig-
nity as capitalist plague-bearers, Billy and I trudged through the
snows to the Lux, at least once and sometimes several times a day.
I shudder to think what havoc we wrought among the more eager
careerists of our acquaintance.

It was, and presumably still is, an extraordinary place, the Lux
Hotel. Physically it had the character of an overcrowded tene-
ment, an overflow of untidy perambulators in the lobby, pervasive
and peculiarly unpleasant food smells, slatternly housewives, coo-
ing and quarreling audible in the corridors. The elaborate pre-
cautions in guarding the inmates added a prison aura to the cab-
bage odors. The population of the hotel consisted of men and
women, boys and girls, of all nations, colors and tongues, few of
them able to understand one another, all of them awed by the
grandeur and the might of the enthroned revolution. Various as
they were in race and language, their creed was one. In a curious
way, too, their looks were one. If there is such a thing as an inter-
national communist type, it was to be met in the Lux realm — if
not the same features, at least the same negligent dress, unkempt
hair, and the same expression of anxious devotion.

Ostensibly agents or employees of an international organization,
these people had no doubt of their real status. They were the
guests of a successful government, the Kremlin’s poor relations,
eating its food, protected by its police, shadowed by its spies, their
tenure of employment and sojourn in the final instance dependent
on how they measured up in the graces of their hosts. The poor-
relation humility was unmistakable in the shrill pride with which
they boasted of Uncle Kremlin’s importance and strength, and
particularly in the anxiety with which they catered to his every
whim. He was a frowning, cantankerous uncle just then, suspicious
that his foreign nephews and nieces might forget themselves and
play with those horrid Trotsky brats.

Most of them, fresh from cities where they were despised and
persecuted, had never been so close to the honeypots of power and
found the taste heady. Not, mind you, the make-believe power of
leadership in an oppressed or underground revolutionary party,
but the power that is spelled in armies, airplanes, police, unques-
tioning obedience from underlings, and a vision of ultimate world
dominion. Relieved from the risks and responsibilities under

kremlin’s guests and poor relations 71

which they labored at home, their yearning for position, career
and privilege in many cases took on a jungle luxuriance.

Never before had I witnessed so much naked, unashamed syco-
phancy and career-building concentrated under one roof. Who
stood well with whom was the theme song of most conversation.
Breathlessly Comrade X, almost within earshot of her meek spec-
tacled husband, boasted that she had slept with Comrade Y, “a
terribly important communist, you know . . . close to Stalin!”
She was helping her husband get places. The arrival of a com-
munist dignitary from Germany or France, a visit in some room
by a third secretary to Stalin’s secretary, the rumor that the Hun-
garian comrade, the lucky girl, was having an affair with that in-
fluential Chinese comrade — these were the raw stuff of gossip,
speculation, and envies. I saw the “professional revolutionist”
theory reduced to obnoxious absurdity.

With few exceptions, the Lux inmates knew no Russian and
were cut off from such realistic guidance as they might have re-
ceived from the local press. They met few, if any, Russians other
than those told off as liaison officers for the foreign communist
elements. A special news bulletin was prepared for them, in which
Soviet developments were perfumed for their orthodox nostrils.
Several of the bolder Americans in Moscow surreptitiously
dropped into my office at intervals for years to find out what was
happening in Russia by reading my files of American papers!

The guests of the revolution lived a narrow, ingrown life, stew-
ing in their own juices, shuttling between the bureaucratic offices
of the various international headquarters. The Americans among
them might just as well have remained near Union Square, New
York, instead of Red Square, Moscow, for all that they learned
of Soviet realities. Their ignorance of Russia remained correctly
official, stereotyped, and self-righteous.

3

Almost every evening there was a gay party in some Lux com-
rade’s room, in which vodka and dance music flowed freely. We
always met approximately the same people, and it was normally
the same routine of zakusky , liquor, flirting and dancing, aimless
talk in English, German, French, with a rare word of Russian.

72 hallelujah!

One such gathering was in the room of Kostia Umansky. It
was predominantly German in character, Umansky’s wife being a
German. A child prodigy of the German communist movement,
Heinz Neumann, was the pampered guest 3 a few years later this
boy was to become virtual dictator of the movement in Germany
as Stalin’s most trusted lieutenant. We sat on the floor of the
stuffy room, drank, played jazz, and had a gay time of it. Return-
ing to the hotel towards dawn, Billy and I decided that having
accepted so much hospitality, the least we could do was to throw
a party in return.

The result of that counsel of conscience was a gathering about
a week later in room 441 of the Grand Hotel. (We had quickly
relinquished the elegance of our first suite, with its bath and run-
ning water, for this cheaper room.) The party was in every respect
a carbon copy of the other — the same people, the same food and
drinks, even the same gramophone and records — except that it
was in the Grand instead of the Lux and that I paid the bills.
Umansky was having a pleasant time along with the others, the
only fly in the ointment being the protests of neighbors. But evi-
dently his official conscience was bothering him. He drew me aside.

“You know, Gene,” he confided, his face suddenly glum and
official — he was putting me in my place — “this is quite a con-
descension on our part.”

“I don’t understand. What are you condescending about and to
whom?”

“I mean our attending a bourgeois farty” he smiled his smile
full of gold teeth.

“A bourgeois party! But, Kostia, these are the same people, the
same everything as in your room the other night. . .

“No matter! ” he laid down the law, this commissar-to-be. “This
is the Grand Hotel and this is the room of a bourgeois corres-
pondent.”

I retorted much too politely, but with sufficient vigor to leave
no doubt that such sectarian and formalistic “revolutionism”
seemed to me merely ludicrous. The tension of mutual dislike be-
tween us, I suppose, was born at that moment.

This was the first of a series of hints which slowly penetrated
my self-assurance. But for more than a month I continued to
contaminate the sacred purlieus of the Lux with my heathen pres-

kremlin’s guests and poor relations 73

ence. At the end of that time one of my more intimate acquaint-
ances in that establishment took the matter into his own hands, or
perhaps he had been commissioned to speak to me.

“It’s rather embarrassing,” he stammered, “to have a bourgeois
journalist calling on us. Of course, we all know you and like you
and that sort of thing. But this isn’t New York. It’s Moscow and
one must watch his step. The slightest suspicion of any of us and
we go out on our backsides. I’m sure you understand. . .

I tried to make the onerous errand easy for him.

“Is it that they mistrust me or mistrust you?” I asked.

“God knows! Everybody distrusts everybody and everything
here, and the only safe way is to keep your mouth buttoned up
and stick to your job and avoid seeing anyone or anything that’s
not strictly kosher ”

“But after all,” I was thinking aloud rather than arguing, “I
worked for Tass for four years. They’re preparing to publish my
book on the Sacco-Vanzetti case. In fact, I only accepted the
Moscow assignment from the United Press with Moscow’s ex-
plicit permission. It was understood that I would use my strategic
position for the cause.”

My informant shrugged his shoulders, sadly.

Had I been less than snow-white in my revolutionary conscience
I suppose I would have required fewer hints. A number of extraor-
dinary incidents would have served as danger signals and kept me
from intruding my brand-new capitalist personality where it was
not wanted.

There was the episode with Comrade Foushman for a starter.
That began in New York. One evening, at the home of an ac-
quaintance, we met two Soviet visitors. One, a short, compact
little man with a warm smile, was Serebriakov,* a Bolshevik of
considerable importance, at one time a secretary of the Communist
Party, whose political ups and downs are no part of this tale. The
other was Comrade Foushman, who was in the United States for
the Soviet textile industry in connection with Soviet cotton pur-
chases. He was thick-set, red-headed, ebulliently friendly. We
all played poker, and relished the anticipation of our interesting
comradeship in Moscow.

* Executed in January, 1937.

74 hallelujah!

By the time we parted at a taxi door in the rain after midnight,
Foushman and the Lyons family had plighted friendship in the
way that people who like each other spontaneously will do. He
insisted that we take a Soviet silver ruble from him by way of
pledge of the new entente and over and over again he made us
repeat the promise.

“Just as soon as you get to the frontier,” he rehearsed the
arrangements, “you telegraph me to the address I gave you. I’ll
meet you at the station and put you up at my house. ... .”

At Negoreloye we debated whether to telegraph him and de-
cided not to take advantage of his good nature. But our first eve-
ning in Moscow, Miss Jmudskaya got him on the telephone for
me. He sounded genuinely hurt at our failure to notify him
earlier of the momentous event of our arrival, but in the end
forgave us.

“What room are you in? I’ll be right over to see you,” he said.

I saw him about four years later.

That first evening we waited and waited in vain. I wondered
vaguely whether in his rush to see us he might have been run
over. For several days I tried to reach him by telephone, but he
was never available. About four years later my New York editor
asked for information on some matter pertaining to Soviet-Ameri-
can trade and my secretary arranged with the Commissariat for
Foreign Trade for an interview. I arrived at the appointed place
and hour, having paid no attention to the identity of the official
who would receive me. And suddenly I was face to face with
Comrade Foushman! He, too, apparently had not expected his
old poker partner. Both of us pretended blushingly that we had
never met before, and few interviews in my experience were so
strained and unsatisfactory. At its conclusion, however, he detained
me a moment as my secretary walked out. In a thin, apologetic
voice he asked:

“How are you? And how is Billy?”

And he sighed, much as to say, “By this time you understand
how it is. . . . I’m really not to blame. . . .”

In those first weeks the strange disappearance of Comrade
Foushman was one more element in the cumulative bewilderment.
When I told Louis Fischer, the communist publicist, about the
man’s curious behavior, he smiled knowingly. “Don’t you under-

kremlin’s guests and poor relations 75

stand? He doesn’t dare come over. ... The Grand Hotel, you
know, and a foreign correspondent. . . . Foushman is under sus-
picion of Trotskyist leanings and can’t take any chances.” I won-
dered whether Fischer knew that he was himself under that dread
suspicion. A Soviet journalist in Berlin had taken particular pains
to warn me against associating too closely with him on that ground.

Another rebuff that should have enlightened me, but alas! did
not, was my meeting with my recent absentee boss, Jacob Doletzky,
the director-general of Tass. I had counted heavily on his friendly
advice in my new job. For four years we had corresponded and
he was privy to all my hopes for utilizing my new position in
the interests of the revolution. It took me more than a week of
continuous and in the end slightly panicky insistence to receive the
favor of an interview. Finally I found myself in his outer office.
After I had been kept waiting for half an hour, the doors were
thrown open and I was in the blessed presence.

At the far end of a long room stood a vast and shiny desk cov-
ered with many telephones and push buttons, and behind its im-
posing expanse sat a bearded, obese little man, blinking behind
thick glasses. Mussolini, too, makes his visitors walk the length
of a great chamber before he recognizes their petty existence. I
was fated to become excessively familiar with the species of ex-
revolutionary known as a bureaucrat — people who once risked their
lives for a cause but now trembled at the thought of risking their
job by a bold word or gesture.

“So,” he greeted me sarcastically, “you have gone over to the
enemy?”

I staggered under the unexpected blow.

“But, Comrade Doletzky, you yourself agreed that I should
accept Bickel’s offer. Don’t you recall — I was to learn Russian and
get closer to things, then return to Tass? I — ”

“Oh, well, now you’re a bourgeois correspondent all the same.”

And he changed the subject. We talked polite formalities and
he made it clear that I was not to presume on my record of ser-
vice in the Soviet employ to expect special consideration from
Tass. His organization was in contractual relations with my pppo-
sition, the Associated Press, and Tass would therefore regard me
of necessity as a competitor. In conclusion, by way of social salve,
he promised to call me soon and take me and Mrs. Lyons to

j6 HALLELUJAH !

the theater. By the time we left his country, six years later, he
had not yet gotten around to keeping his promise.

One of the few Luxites who remained until the end uninhibited
in his friendliness was Big Bill Haywood, former generalissimo of
the I.W.W.’s. Unluckily his end came too soon. He died three
months after we reached Moscow. In the broken, abnormally cor-
pulent, homesick man with whom we played checkers at the Lux,
there was scarcely a trace of the dynamic Haywood who had made
labor history in America. A little of the old fire came into his
one eye as we recalled episodes and mutual acquaintances in the
I.W.W. movement. Then he relapsed into a tragic and hopeless
boastfulness. The bust a Moscow sculptor was making of him, a
diploma of some sort which he had been presented. . . . He
reached avidly for American cigarettes and waxed lyrical over the
memory of American grub.

Though stupidly regarded by so many as “un-American,” Hay-
wood’s every nerve and muscle was rooted in the American soil,
and the movement which he started and led — a movement of
hoboes, drifters, unskilled workers, lumberjacks and miners — was
likewise authentically American in a sense that made it incompre-
hensible to foreign students. He had fled to Russia with other
I.W.W. men while out on bail and was therefore forever cut off
from his native land. This robust, two-fisted American, essentially
democratic and idealistic in his instincts, found the Bolshevik sys-
tem of impersonal brutality hateful and fumed inwardly because
he could say and do nothing about it. After a lifetime of fighting
what he considered the delusions of political action, he could not
swallow a super-state, whatever slogans it might profess. He was
suddenly an impotent alien, dependent on the bounty of a dic-
tatorial state, and unable to return home. Out of one prison he
had escaped into another. He was a pathetic ruin.

The solace of his last years was a Russian wife much younger
than himself, who nursed him and coddled him with great devo-
tion. It was her firm hand which kept him from drink and im-
posed absolute rest and thus prolonged his life. The one time that
he overrode her insistence ended him. He heard about a party
for the Lyonses at Fellow-worker McLeod’s — another I.W.W
exile— on the other side of the Moscow River. “Mammy,” a Ne-

kremlin’s guests and poor relations 77

gress who had lived in Russia thirty-five or forty years, would
be there to prepare American food. Billy would be bringing an
American ukulele. For the first time in more than a year, there-
fore, Bill Haywood left the Lux, trailed by his protesting wife.
The party, unfortunately, grew much too hilarious and Big Bill
was caught up in it. Recklessly he drank vodka and ate “Mam-
my’s” waffles and joined in I.W.W. songs to a ukulele accompani-
ment.

Only his wife knew how seriously ill he was and pleaded with
him to desist, but he kissed her gaily and tried to reassure her.
After the party he took to bed and two weeks later died in the
Kremlin hospital. It was on May 18, the same day the Shakhty
sabotage trial began. In cabling his death I “scooped” the other
American reporters by many hours — the first of these petty suc-
cesses and a victory that was all sorrow. Haywood’s ashes were
buried in the communist cemetery on the outskirts of the city.

4

We were first led to the “salon” of Rachelle Ossipovna by sev-
eral of the Negro comrades studying at the Lenin Institute and
other communist institutions. A few of these black Americans were
fully aware of the risks and rewards of the communist career they
were embracing. Others saw in communism only a short-cut to
racial equality, ultimately for all their people, but immediately
— and that was far more important — for themselves. They were
not only accepted as equals by the comrades but given a privileged
role by virtue of the bourgeois slavery their color symbolized.

A good many of these Negro recruits, however, had stumbled
into the communist career ignorantly. The most pathetic in this
group was a thin, sad-eyed little girl from Chicago, flat-nosed,
thick-lipped and black as India ink. She told us her story:

She had never graduated from elementary school and dreamed
of an education while washing dishes in a Chicago restaurant. She
confided her burning hope for learning to her friends. Then one
of them brought her amazing news. Some organization was offer-
ing free scholarships to several young Negroes for an education
in a Moscow university. She had never heard of communism or
world revolution. She had at most a faint notion that there was

78 hallelujah!

a country called Russia somewhere in the far far-away. But the
tidings of the scholarship fired her imagination — not merely an
education but a “university” and travel!

“Well,” she said, “I sure applied but didn’t have no hopes no-
how that I’d be chosen but I prayed hard to the Lawd even while
I washed the dishes. I didn’t know then why they chose me and
I don’t know yet, because I sure ain’t fit for it. But they looked
me over, they did, and said I’d make ‘good material.’

“When I told the folks at home I was going to Moscow my
mammy cried and my old man threatened to thrash me, but I
explained that I was gonna get an education in a university and
wouldn’t have to wash no more dishes, then I would come back
and get myself a good job teaching or office work or something.
Anyhow, about a year and a half ago I got to Moscow. . . .

“Then the trouble began. Instead of teaching me writing and
figuring and such things, why, they began to lecture me about
Marxism and dialectic materialism and the Party line and the
class war, which sure ain’t gonna help me get no better job back
home, is it now?”

To make things worse, the barracks in which she was housed
was less attractive than the slum she had left behind in Chicago,
and the monthly stipend was not enough to live on. By the time
it penetrated her bewildered and unlettered mind that she was
being trained to lead revolution, a year had passed. It would be
hard to face her family without the education she had promised
them and it was difficult to extract return fare from the commit-
tee at the Lenin Institute. So she decided she might as well finish
the three-year course. . . .

At least she was a great social success, invited out every night
to some Russian home. Negroes are such a rarity in Russia that
people stop to stare at them in the streets. They are sought after
as exotic additions to any party. Among the male Negroes was one
who subsequently ran for Vice-President of the United States on
the communist ticket. They were the most popular men in the
Soviet capital. To the fillip of their astonishing color they added
the tang of their status as symbols of the oppressed nationalities
of the world in revolt.

“Yes,” one of the Negro boys said, “we’re hauled out every-
where, at meetings and clubs as samples of the oppressed races,

kremlin’s guests and poor relations 79

and we make speeches which nobody understands, but everybody
applauds and cheers anyhow. That’s not so bad. It’s the women-
folks drive me crazy, always telephoning and wanting to be loved.
You know there’s a limit to a man’s time.” He laughed lustily.

One Saturday night this man had swallowed a few more vodkas
than his quota in the Grand Hotel ballroom. I was present when
he staggered out and addressed the droshky driver.

“How much you gonna charge me from here to Lenox Avenue
and 135th Street, boss?” he asked in English.

The cabbie was taking no chances, even if he didn’t understand
the foreign gibberish. “ Pyat rublei he said.

“Five rubles to Lenox Avenue,” the customer laughed, “too
much, boss, too much,” and staggered away on foot.

Well, it was through the good offices of the budding Negro
revolutionaries that we met Rachelle. She and her husband (who
was a supernumerary in that household) were relatively well fixed.
For themselves, several sons and a servant girl, they had two
good-sized rooms, and were therefore the envy of four or five
neighbors in what was formerly one apartment. In the pre-revolu-
tionary days Rachelle had run a real literary and artistic salon in
Petrograd. Persons of consequence had been among her guests.
Now, reduced to two rooms, into which she had crowded an im-
mense amount of furniture and other debris of her former afflu-
ence, the urge to hunt artistic lions was still strong upon her. The
animals she snared, alas! were not very leonine: a few ballerinas,
American Negroes, a number of opera hopefuls, and a miscellany
of people who enjoyed her food. But her anxious imagination
turned them quickly into lions all the same. She introduced them
to one another and to outsiders as great dancers, opera stars, liter-
ary luminaries, important foreigners, etc. She was herself the only
one who believed it.

Under her eccentricities and innocent pretensions, Rachelle Ossi-
povna had a lively mind and a heart of pure gold. From the first
she developed a soaring admiration for Billy, and showed her a
thousand signs of unselfish devotion. In those first difficult months,
when the people on whose friendship we had counted began to
ostracize us in the interest of their political careers, Rachelle’s
friendship was one of the few things we could count on implicitly.

There was a dark moment when our daughter suddenly fell ill

80 hallelujah!

at the hotel. Finding doctors and medicines at unusual hours with
only a few words of Russian to help us and a most inadequate
purse was no simple matter. We felt ourselves indescribably alone.
Several people who would have helped were frankly afraid to
come to the hotel. It was unsafe even then for a Soviet citizen to
visit foreigners under such public auspices. Rachelle, however,
rushed over immediately and remained for some forty-eight hours,
until Genie was out of danger.

Despite restrictions, our circle of acquaintanceship grew. Rus-
sians in political positions and communists with ambitions to nurse,
naturally steered clear of foreigners — unless they were specifically
“assigned” to encourage such intercourse. Those who remained,
in the long-run, were the lowly and the average, run-of-the-mill
actors, singers, writers, sometimes brave in the absolute purity of
their conscience, other times too naive to understand the risks they
were running. Like all sensible foreigners, we learned to curb our
social instincts and waited always for Russians to make the first
gesture toward continued relations, to spare everyone concerned
possible embarrassment. As it became increasingly risky for them
to associate with a foreign journalist, we received fewer invitations,
entertained less, and were driven increasingly into the foreign col-
ony for sheer human warmth, but on the whole we continued to
have more day-to-day contacts with all sorts of Russians, as far
as I am aware, than any other non-communist correspondent in
the country.

III. Nep: Burlesque on Capitalism

I CAUGHT Moscow in a critical moment of transition. Within
less than a year it would have a totally new character. I did not
realize it at the time. Only in retrospect the significance of that
point in Soviet history became clear to me.

Trotsky was an exile in Alma-Ata, Turkestan, and his name
was being expunged from Soviet text-books, records, and history.
His more prominent supporters were scattered in concentration
camps, prisons and places of exile in Siberia, the Far North or
Central Asia. All of them had completed the tragic cycle: from
exile through revolution to exile. The remnants of Trotsky’s sym-
pathizers in the ranks of the ruling Communist Party were being
mopped up with small consideration for fairness and none for
sentiment. In my first fortnight in Moscow, I read the letters of
a young workman, the brother of an American I.W.W., whisked
from his factory bench and hurled into Siberia for expressing re-
grets over Trotsky’s defeat too loudly. I heard stories of idealistic
young communists who committed suicide in despair over what
they considered the collapse of the revolution, though I could not
check the truth of such stories.

“Nep,” the New Economic Policy of socialist-capitalist compro-
mise introduced by Lenin in 1921, was in process of “liquidation.”
Without actually decreeing the end of that period, the Kremlin
was effectively choking it to death. Confiscatory “tax arrears” were
imposed which automatically wiped out one private enterprise after
another. The Nepmen, the private traders of this compromise
period, were arrested for real or imaginary infractions of real or
imaginary laws and hustled to Siberia or the North. The tolerance
under which the more industrious or shrewder peasants expanded
their holdings in land, livestock and other property was abruptly
reversed.

There were intervals of doubt this year, in which there seemed
a possibility that the attack might be restrained. Its wishful-think-

81

82 hallelujah!

ing victims believed at moments that the worst was over 5 but they
were dismally wrong. A new epoch had begun: what was in effect
a die-hard drive for full socialization.

Had I arrived ten or twelve months later, so rapid was the
process, I would have missed the momentous change. As it was,
I had a fleeting but unforgettable glimpse of the Russia which the
newly entrenched leader, Joseph Stalin, had doomed. Despite the
ruthless proofs that their day was over, many of those who had
thrived under Nep dosed themselves with deceptive hope. How
could the government shut down all private trade, they asked,
when it had no economic machinery for the effective distribution
of goods ready to take its place? How could it crush the small
enterprises and artisan establishments manufacturing everyday
necessities for the population when it was unable to manufacture
those things itself?

“Nonsense,” the proprietor of a private seed shop around the
corner from the Grand Hotel argued with me, “they can’t do it.
Already the muzhiks are hiding their grain or refusing to sow
more than enough for themselves because they can’t get manu-
factured goods or seed. The Kremlin will not be insane enough
to make this situation worse by closing shops like mine and cutting
off the supplies provided by handicraft workers.”

A few weeks later this same seed merchant, however, came to
me in a condition of utter panic. The financial inspectors had piled
ruinous retroactive taxes on him, knowing full well that he could
not pay them. His career as a trader was ended.

“For God’s sake,” he pleaded, “let me work for you. Anything
— I’ll run your errands, or make your stove — anything so I can
claim that I am gainfully employed. Maybe I will then be allowed
to join a trade union after a while. If not, it’s expulsion from my
apartment, maybe Siberia.”

A few of the more perspicacious foreign observers were aware
of the implications of this process of “liquidating Nep.” I recall
that Paul Scheffer of the Berliner Tagehlatt was the first to write
boldly that Nep was ended, and that Duranty, who was his disciple
and wisely so, followed his lead in this regard, though more
guardedly as was his way. Most of the others recorded the indi-
vidual episodes in the process without venturing to make clear-cut
deductions. As for the Russians, they were instinctively appre-

nep: burlesque on capitalism 83

hensive and excited by the tension of impending change. But no
one, perhaps not even the responsible leaders in the Kremlin,
guessed how quickly and how thoroughly Nep would be swept out,
to give way to the slogans and sacrifices and inspired cruelties of
the Five Year Plan.

The Tverskaya, Moscow’s, and therefore Russia’s, “Main
Street,” of that time, remains in my mind as almost a symbolic
representation of the transitional moment. It was, or seems to me
in retrospect, a microcosm of the half-socialist, half-capitalist Rus-
sia which was expiring. Along its length were private stores, state
shops, private restaurants, gypsy cellars, the government-operated
gambling Casino, private peddlers, beggars and prostitutes, the
offices of state trusts and the headquarters of the leading news-
papers.

The street runs from the fringe of Red Square northward to
the Triumphal Arch commemorating the Muscovite victory over
Napoleon, past the Alexandrovsky station, and on to the city of
Tver (from which it takes its name) and beyond that to Lenin-
grad. It is the first street traversed by tourists arriving from the
West, since it connects the railroad station with the hotel district.
It is the street with which they are likely to become most familiar
in the ensuing days, because it holds such standard tourist fare as
the Anti-Religious Museum, the Museum of the Revolution, the
Lenin Institute, the Moscow Soviet and the new Telegraph Build-
ing. The first impressions of Moscow are thus the gift ' of the
Tverskaya.

The blood of Russian history has flowed through this artery as
through no other. The pulse of the Tverskaya is the pulse of
Russia. On holidays, now as for centuries, it is the most lavishly
decorated and illuminated, the most crowded and most sensitive
to popular feeling. Until 1917, imperial parades, religious pag-
eants flowed through it; and since then, the floods of singing,
cheering humanity under a froth of red banners. It was here, in
the palace of the Governor-General that is now the home of the
Moscow Soviet, that the Bolshevik staff had its headquarters in
the crucial days of November, 1917. It was here, from the corner
balcony of the National Hotel, a few blocks farther down, that
Leon Trotsky made his last dramatic appearance in Moscow in
November ten years later, and was howled down and yanked

84 hallelujah!

away by G.P.U. men. The melodrama of Russian history, the
colossal ironies of its last great change, seem more sharply re-
flected on the Tverskaya than elsewhere. The very buildings on
both sides of the street, the names and monuments, _ attest the
revolution. Yet they retain a brooding sense of something ageless
and unchanging.

On a pedestal opposite the Strasnoi Monastery (now the Anti-
Religious Museum) Russia’s great national poet, Alexander Push-
kin, has stood since 1880, watching the ebb and flow of the Tver-
skaya’s human tides, mulling over the rotation of chronological
and political seasons. Nothing can surprise him any longer. Once
there were self-important officers with their shoulders squared off
by heavy epaulets, uniformed civil servants, ragged peasants ; now
the officers were no longer epauleted, the civil servants carried
brief cases, the peasants were still ragged. Always there were chil-
dren racing and shrieking their delight around the base of his
pedestal; always the lovelorn passed him without recognition, ab-
sorbed in one another and quoting his lines without knowing it;
always the aged, the beggared, the heartsore. And they must seem
to Pushkin the same people, the same loves and despairs that he
found on the day he mounted his pedestal.

2

At the time of my arrival I did not quite grasp the meaning
of Moscow’s “Main Street,” where Nep was having its last hys-
terical fling. The Nep period was an armed truce at best. The
resumption of hostilities was inevitable. But the truce had lasted
seven years and the nation had come to regard it as more or less
permanent.

A new middle class of Nepmen — private merchants, artisans,
small-scale manufacturers, professional men, bureaucrats in com-
fortable berths, more prosperous peasants, the criminal elements
which are the excrescence of private initiative — had come into be-
ing. Some of them were resuscitated middle-class people of the
pre-revolutionary era, others were tasting affluence and the sweets
of privilege for the first time.

No more extraordinary class has ever been called into being and
blown into oblivion in the memory of humankind. Because it was

nep: burlesque on capitalism 85

young, born in chaos and in some measure outside the law, be-
cause it was at bottom uncertain of its tenure and therefore des-
perately eager to make the most of its advantages immediately, it
was exceptionally vulgar, profiteering, crude, and noisy. Under
capitalism the bourgeoisie has the poise and self-assurance that
come with power. It has a culture of its own and an ideology of
self -justification. In Nep Russia, for the first time, there was the
anomaly of a large bourgeoisie without political power, without
culture, without respect for its own class.

It was a class existing by sufferance, despised and insulted by the
population and oppressed by the government. It became a curious
burlesque on capitalism, self-conscious, shifty, intimidated, and
ludicrous. It had money, comforts and other physical advantages,
yet remained a pariah element, the butt of popular humor and
the target of official discrimination.

And the stamp of this strange middle class was everywhere on
Moscow. Its fitting sign, it seemed, was the prostitution that
thrived on the sidewalks of the Tverskaya and in front of the
leading public baths. Its desperation was mirrored in the Casino,
a gambling hell run by the government. Every night until late
dawn the Casino was filled with the newly rich, embezzling offi-
cials, underworld characters, and foreigners with money to throw
away. The Soviet regime took a heavy rake-off on roulette, chemin-
de-fer and other games, the G.P.U. marked off its future victims
by watching who had more money than he could comfortably ex-
plain, and everyone suspected that the games were not quite on
the level. But that did not affect attendance.

About one-quarter of the shops in Moscow were still privately
conducted and carried the names of their owners. The rapidity
with which such personal names retreated before the synthetic
official titles was one of the symptoms of the new revolution ush-
ered in by Stalin’s era of industrialization. Soon there was not a
single private name inscribed on any shop. Ivanovs and Abramo-
viches gave way to “Mosselproms” and “Mostorgs.”

The private shops were higher-priced than their government
competitors next door— they had to be to meet the staggering
taxes. But they had more and better merchandise, and exerted
themselves to please the customers. By contrast the official stores
were pitifully poor, crude, and unprofitable. In the production and

86 hallelujah!

marketing of articles of general use, the Nep sector of the nation’s
economy clearly had the edge on the government, despite official
discrimination, punitive impositions, and frank persecution.

For the first time in history, individual and government in-
dustry were pitted against one another throughout a great nation,
their wares displayed in adjoining stalls, as it were, in open and
ruthless competition. “Unfair” and “unethical” are mild bourgeois
words for the competitive methods used by the state, but it was
being badly worsted notwithstanding — so badly worsted that it
inevitably invoked its sovereign right to exterminate its competi-
tors altogether.

But meantime, as a matter of common convenience, we met in
private cafes and ice-cream parlors. We ate in private restaurants,
of which there were a dozen along Tverskaya. We shopped in
private stores, called in private physicians and used the services
of private photographers, dentists, and other professional people.
Everyone else, from commissars down, did likewise. By the end
of the year most of this private traffic was ended.

Since we could not afford to eat in the hotel — except for the
extravagance of an occasional breakfast — Billy learned to cook on
a single-heater electric stove, despite regular warnings from the
hotel management that it was strictly prohibited. She accepted the
hardships smilingly. Considering her theatrical background and
Broadway tastes, I had feared Billy would find Moscow intoler-
able. But she proved more resilient than I did. With only a few
words of “kitchen Russian” at her disposal, she bargained with
the peasants on Hunters’ Row, returning to the hotel triumph-
antly with chicken, vegetables, meat, dairy products and fruit in
tow. There were still numerous markets where such foodstuffs,
not to mention clothes and the products of home industry, could
be bought at prices which seemed to us steep, but in a few months
were to seem, in retrospect, incredibly cheap. Later we were to
hear Russians sigh over “the good old days,” referring to the
Nep days rather than the tsarist times. Having tasted a little of
the vanishing plenitude in the twilight hours of Nep, we could
understand their nostalgia. Private kiosks sold candy, flowers,
sausages. Sidewalk hucksters offered home-made brassieres, tooth-
picks, wooden toys, aprons, frozen apples.

nep: burlesque on capitalism 87

The figure of one of these hucksters, around the corner from
our hotel, sticks in my mind: a sad-eyed fellow who announced
the wares on his improvised push-cart and their prices in the sing-
song of synagogue chants, more engrossed in the sacred melodies
than the profane words.

A number of narrow shops, mere crevices between buildings,
specialized in domestic and imported sausage for which the Rus-
sians have an inordinate fondness. The succulent garlicky aromas
were more effective advertising than the most spacious show win-
dow would have been. One of these crevices, by some accident,
survived for years after all other private trade was extinct. There
is in Russia always at least one startling exception to prove even
the most rigid rule, as though tolerated for purposes of dramatic
contrast, or by way of museum exhibit.

3

Our chief personal problem, as that of every other permanent
resident, was housing. A city with accommodations, at most, for
a million, already had a population of over three million. Tens of
thousands more poured into Moscow every day: clerks in the un-
wieldy bureaucratic apparatus, peasants anxious to become pro-
letarians, youth seeking an education or a new start. Flats that for-
merly housed one family now contained half a dozen, with an
overflow of “house workers” (servants) sleeping on boxes in the
corridor, on the kitchen floor, on the common oven.

On most apartment doors there was a card listing the inmates,
with complicated instructions for ringing:

Alexandrov ring I

Stepanov ring 2

Lazarovsky ring 2 short, I long

Kagan ring 4 short, 3 long; etc.

At the first stir of the bell people in their crowded cubicles
automatically paused in their work or play, quarrels or love-mak-
ing, to count the rings. Little things in a new environment have
a way of impressing themselves on the newcomer’s mind out of
proportion to their importance. A curious awareness of the intimate
life of Moscow being suspended for a moment over and over again

88 hallelujah!

—like a motion picture that suddenly stops moving— became part
of my private sense of the Soviet capital.

No one who has not lived through a space shortage in a great
city can imagine the terrors of the situation. It cannot be appre-
hended at second-hand. People married and divorced, lied and
denounced their neighbors, for a little space. The law courts were
jammed with cases growing out of disputes over living quarters.

In the midst of this hideous overcrowding, however, many
privileged officials, police officers, and particularly Nepmen had
managed to acquire the luxury of entire apartments of two or
more rooms. Space was the measure of affluence, as a bank bal-
ance might be in America. Many Nepmen who had read the hand-
writing on the wall were at the moment trying to dispose profit-
ably of their apartments and were especially anxious to lay their
hands on foreign currency. In the following years we blamed our-
selves for stupidity in not snatching up such a bargain. But the
prices seemed exorbitant to us, fresh as we were from New York.
We felt certain that the housing situation would improve— it
would have been disloyal to think otherwise — and that such an
expenditure, even if we could borrow the money, was inadvisable.
One such apartment remained as a glamorous memory to taunt
us: half of an eight-room lay-out, with a tiled bathroom and other
alluring conveniences, which was offered to us for a mere three
thousand dollars down and a rental thereafter.

Had we accepted it, we would have missed the nightmare years
on Chistiye Prudy (Clean Ponds) Boulevard, as occupants of one
half of a former stable. We paid fifteen hundred dollars for the
privilege of entering the place, the United Press having come to
our rescue with a loan deducted from my wages. Further pay-
ments agreed upon, fortunately, went by default, because the Nep-
man who had remodeled the stable was sent to a concentration
camp in the nick of time.

The other half of the glorified stable was occupied by a Soviet
bookkeeper, his fat and slovenly wife and a brood of snot-nosed
children. We shared a kitchen and an improvised bathroom be-
tween us, and a corridor in which their servant girl slept on boxes.
Our servant girl slept more comfortably in the parlor. Human
labor was the only commodity cheap and plentiful in Moscow,
so that even an underpaid bookkeeper could afford a servant} in-

nep: burlesque on capitalism 89

deed, every family needed an extra person to stand in lines and
to explore distant markets in the perpetual search for food.

Our share consisted of three narrow rooms, the abnormally high
ceilings turning them even narrower and giving them an exotic
look. We carpeted the floor and disguised the stable with the
camouflage of wall hangings, pictures, maps, lamps, until it took
on the character of a queer but colorful bohemianism.

Our chief afflictions on Chistiye Prudy Boulevard were moist
walls and unpleasant neighbors. The house was without a foun-
dation, and as the winter thawed into spring, the walls began to
sweat. Great leprous patches along the floor line and on the ceiling
spread slowly but surely. Consultation with engineers hatched the
device of a secondary set of walls of building board, with a few
inches of air between. When the board was found and the inner
shell built, with much tribulation and expense, and all of it painted
jet black, our apartment looked quite “Greenwich Villagey.” The
wetness was for the most part foiled, though it made repeated
and sometimes successful forays.

The neighbors, however, could not be foiled. Although their
half was exactly the same size and shape as ours, they lacked our
skill in camouflage. Their rooms were crowded, filthy, and ema-
nated obnoxious odors. We painted our doorways and thresholds
with chemicals intended to bar the vermin that luxuriated un-
noticed and uncontrolled on their side. Often enough I was
tempted to administer the chemical to Sashka, whose continuous
whining — a peculiar off-key soprano with tremolos, trills, quavers
and consecutive fifths— embittered my existence. The entire family
took a reactionary view of the machine age and refused adamantly
to use a toilet bowl as modem science intended, preferring to squat
on it in traditional Asiatic fashion. The bathtub we had finally
found and installed seemed to them the most natural place for
the disposal of garbage.

Because our half of the stable was colorful and perversely clean,
we became in the eyes of our neighbors horrible exemplars of the
capitalism which they actually envied and therefore thought that
they hated. The two “apartments” branching off from a common
corridor did, indeed, provide a symbolic model of two worlds.
On one side, cleanliness and relative comfort 5 on the other, dirt,
noise and poverty at ease in its own offal.

90 hallelujah!

The entrance to the place was through a common yard, around
which several score other families lived in verminous ant-heaps.
Though we deliberately tried to dress Genie in clothes bought in
Moscow, so that she might be less conspicuous among the other
children, her neatness and foreign manner set her apart. She
learned to speak Russian almost immediately and played with the
Russian children, but she remained an Amerikanka and a boorz-
hooika in their young ideological eyes. Our better food, our
American clothes, our well-dressed visitors, the fact that we pos-
sessed a telephone and a gramophone, made us conspicuous. We
were closely observed and openly envied. Under the surface po-
liteness, there was a resentment of our advantages which we
could understand and forgive.

As in all Moscow courtyards, the iron gates were closed in the
evening. By midnight the dvornik, or concierge, a limping, bearded
old man straight out of Chekhov, was invariably drunk and dead
to the world. No amount of ringing could arouse him. Billy and
I learned to scale the gate, though it was fifteen feet high, and
in time were so adept at this exercise that we no longer ripped
our clothes on the spikes. We always felt like thieves in the night
while clambering over the grilled barrier and expected to be
arrested for house-breaking. Once a militiaman did question the
procedure and only our lack of Russian saved us from a trip to
the police station.

Casual visitors at our Chistiye Prudy palace could not guess at
the moisture, the persecution by envious neighbors, and a thou-
sand other discomforts. They exclaimed over the charm of the
“artistic” black walls and the knick-knacks with which we sought
to make the place tolerable as a permanent abode. A near-com-
munist from New York, in the exaltation of her tourist sojourn
in the communist Mecca, found our quarters distressingly “bour-
geois.” Evidently, she had counted on me to demonstrate the sin-
cerity of my radicalism by wearing a Russian blouse and giving
right of way to the neighbor’s bedbugs. Returning to her spa-
cious and elegantly furnished apartment on Madison Avenue, she
reported to mutual friends that Gene Lyons was living in Moscow
like a bourzhooy.

It was the beginning of a legend in New York revolutionary

nep: burlesque on capitalism 91

circles — the legend that I had suddenly and inexplicably gone
capitalist.

Moscow abounds with Americans who demonstrate the ardor
of their faith by wearing Russian shirts, shaving their heads, de-
filing their vocabulary, and snubbing everyone who fails in these
externals of the ritual. Long after the Russian communists had
stuck their shirt-tails into their trousers and blossomed out in
gaudy neckties, these outsiders persevered in their romantic non-
sense.

There was the heart-rending plight of a young lady who strug-
gled bravely to survive on a Soviet ruble salary. She dressed and
lived like a Soviet worker, would not supplement her rations with
foreign-currency purchases and hinted darkly at the sacrifices she
was making for the cause. Her father was a Mid-Western mil-
lionaire.

Another couple, man and wife, likewise kept themselves to the
discipline of living like Russians. They disdained the bourgeois
comforts of the better hotels and the solace of dollar-shop food
supplies, boarding instead with Soviet citizens and keeping within
a modest budget no larger than a well-paid Russian’s income. Only
the fact that everyone knew them to be wealthy as well as socially
prominent in America spoiled the sympathy which they merited.

A former American concessionaire had lived in Russia for many
years in ample style. He professed to be a communist at heart.
The discrepancy between his manner of living and his professions
bothered him and in the end he decided upon reform. He would
live like a Russian! He therefore summoned his servant, that is
to say, house worker, and announced the new regime. The house
worker was a hunch-backed old woman.

“The old life is over,” he told her. “Hereafter we will live like
Russians. We will not buy in the foreign shops any more. Begin-
ning tomorrow you will buy in the markets and you will stand in
line like other house workers P

Unluckily, I lacked the talents for these surface conformities.
When I wore a rubashka it was for the un-ideological reason that
it seemed more comfortable at the moment. When I shaved my
head it was in the un-Marxian hope of arresting baldness. We
did not conceal the fact that an American wage and the privileges
extended to foreign correspondents made existence easier for us.

gz hallelujah!

Neither did we scruple to be seen in public in the company of
other foreigners or to dance occasionally at the Grand Hotel.

These were serious and costly errors of judgment. Not that
Russians objected. On the contrary, they were often offended by
foreigners who “dressed down” to them. They ridiculed the mock-
revolutionism of certain foreigners. But every detail of my bour-
geois indulgences, from the hangings on the wallboard to the
fox-trots in the hotel, were duly reported to my friends in New
York, with fine embellishments. And thus they knew that I was
on the highroad to capitalist perdition.

IV. Hallelujah!

IF LOVE is blind, faith is both deaf and blind. These blessed
imperfections of deeply rooted belief, which are also its strength,
help explain the perennial mystery about Russia.

That mystery is why two foreigners, equally honest and intel-
ligent, having passed through the same routine of sight-seeing and
interviews, emerge with diametrically opposite impressions of the
Soviet land. What is to one a “gray, unsmiling population” is for
the other the inspiring spectacle of a “grimly determined popu-
lation.” One speaks of “magnificent industrial discipline,” the other
of “factory serfs.” One declaims about the tyranny of fashion hav-
ing ended — “an uninhibited, unpretentious and truly democratic
attitude towards clothes,” as the new U.P. correspondent put it
early in 1928. The other dismisses this achievement of the revo-
lution in some such phrase as “ragged, pathetically patched
people.”

The contrast goes much farther than different interpretations
of the same physical facts. The facts themselves sometimes fade
from the mental retina of the faithful, or by the same token, are
vastly enlarged in the mind of the unbeliever.

It is no special perspicacity that enabled me to recognize and
forgive blind spots as large as all of Russia in the anxious tourists
who came to me, as to all other permanent residents, with letters
of introduction. It merely happens that my inner experience com-
passed almost the whole range of reactions between a purblind
enthusiasm that shouted down its doubts and an aching disillusion-
ment that sometimes did less than justice to the Bolsheviks.

I have watched an American communist leader in the Soviet
Union, a young man of genuinely idealistic instincts, wash out all
disturbing sights and sounds with vodka, filling the interstices of
sobriety with erotic excitements, so that he might bring back his
faith to New York intact. I saw a soft-hearted Seattle clergyman
take to bed to avoid seeing too much that hurt him. His daughter,

93

94 HALLELUJAH !

who writes many books about the glories of the new Russia, cau-
tioned me to say nothing to the old man that might distress him,
and I agreed to the conspiracy. Another clerical gentleman sat in
my office bewailing the fact that the age-old motives of greed and
self-seeking were still rampant in Russia. Indeed, I consoled him
with the hope that young people at least were developing new,
more socially-minded goads to action. He left Russia to compose,
in all sincerity I am sure, a book to prove that brand-new moti-
vations guided conduct under the Soviets.

Such crude self-deceptions, however, are the exception rather
than the rule. Faith needs little conscious assistance. It brews its
own deceptions far below the surface.

I recall a scene in the hotel room of another correspondent. A
well-known British journalist, Ashmead Bartlett, was attacking
everything Soviet in bitterly sarcastic detail. A half-hearted and
unconvincing defense was being put up by a Soviet functionary,
Sergei Trivas. Trivas himself felt constrained to admit certain
facts which shocked my sensibilities. I listened in mounting anger,
then turned furiously on them both. They were maligning the
revolution! Nobody here was lining his own pockets as in Eng-
land or America! In the face of the greatest event in all human
history they were bickering about mistakes in policy. And to think
of a Soviet official admitting such libels on the revolution! Trivas
quickly retreated and left the field of battle to Anglo-American
journalism. The dispute became more heated and finally was
halted on the sheer brink of a fist fight.

Yet Bartlett, Trivas, and the others in the room had only taken
for granted commonplaces evident to the naked eye and the
naked intelligence — facts which I too was to accept as a matter
of course a few months later. (That clash with Bartlett, inci-
dentally, was duly reported to the G.P.U. and raised my stock
considerably in those mysterious quarters, I was to learn later.)

I needed no help in retouching everything I saw to match my
expectations. No one who has not been close to the revolutionary
movement in his own country can quite understand the palpitant
anxiety with which a foreign radical approaches the realities of
an established and functioning proletarian regime. Or the exal-
tation with which he finally confronts the signs and symbols of
that regime. It is a species of self-fulfillment, a thrilling identi-

hallelujah! 95

fication with Power. Phrases and pictures and colors, tunes and
turns of thought connected in my mind with years of ardent desire
and even a measure of sacrifice were now in evidence all around
in the places of honor, dominance, unlimited power!

A strong sympathizer with the communist point of view, arriv-
ing in Russia, is in a curiously hectic state psychologically and
emotionally. A member of a small and maligned sect, he finds
himself magically in a place where his sect holds complete sway.
All his life, perhaps, the massive head of Karl Marx was asso-
ciated in his consciousness with a fervent mission. Now he finds
that symbol in every office, every railroad station, on postage
stamps, in ten thousand store windows, on pedestals in the public
squares! The word “comrade” was the password of a small and
ridiculed minority. Suddenly it is a title of nobility and a talisman
of power! The revolutionary jargon, until yesterday known only
to a few initiates, today is the official and dominant tongue over
a sixth part of the globe’s surface. The brawny, flame-eyed pro-
letarians of the revolutionary posters, once symbols of revolt, are
suddenly become symbols of dominion!

Consider the emotional force of the song International for such
a visitor. At home it was played and sung, perhaps, in secret. At
best it was surrounded with an aura of social rebellion, dangers of
arrest, economic hazard, the risk of deportation. Suddenly that
song is blared forth mightily by a dozen combined military bands
on Red Square, its pulse is carried to millions of workers deployed
in the streets of Moscow, challenging and threatening and exult-
ing. Diplomats representing the whole world meekly bare their
heads in token of respect to its rhythm. It is no longer a marching
song, but a triumphal hymn, backed up by a government and
armies and air forces and secret police.

Small wonder that this visitor is in no condition to grasp or
hold lowly facts. His world is in the soaring clouds. Whether it
will take him a year or ten years to descend again to earth depends
on his own make-up. It is presumptuous to expect foreign com-
munists to see the Soviet social landscape except through the prism
of their own feelings and convictions. Their minds become finely
adjusted instruments for selecting impressions in harmony with
their exalted state. The validity of their life’s work, their suffer-
ings, and their sacrifices is at stake. Who can estimate the pain

96 hallelujah!

and frustration that have gone into those books of communists who
came to their Russian utopias and found them unacceptable! Their
minds and hearts are a shambles of bleeding illusions, and the
insults from their former comrades are salt on their open wounds.
Such men and women are scarcely to be blamed if they shrink
from the realities and seek sanctuary in desperate rationalizations.

It was through an emotional haze that I viewed the new Bol-
shevik world around me. My early dispatches out of Moscow were
laudatory, though toned down to conceal my bias. Each of them
sheathed a poison dart aimed at the heart of the capitalist system.
Every fact which might be misunderstood by a world of infidels
was carefully explained and turned by implication into one more
proof of revolutionary wisdom or courage.

I often read the messages of my colleagues in comparing notes
on how we covered some event or decree. Junius Wood of the
Chicago Daily News had a talent for piling up indisputable detail
which somehow added up to ridicule. Duranty juggled his phrases,
and even in his ostensible eulogies left a fuzzy margin of uncer-
tainty. Edward Deuss of the International News Service wrote
with a bread-and-butter realism that ignored the “deeper mean-
ings” of the revolution. William Henry Chamberlin of the Chris-
tian Science Monitor was always exact and scholarly and passion-
less.

But all of them seemed to me so exasp eratingly calm and com-
posed in the midst of high historical drama. I resented their bore-
dom. I was continuously astonished how many unsavory stories
they found right in the Soviet newspapers which somehow escaped
my attention.

My dispatches in these months, as I say, were consistently and
ardently partisan. It was a fight to the death between capitalist
and socialist elements, in which those in the capitalist trenches de-
served and received no quarter from my typewriter.

The necessity to report individual episodes under the limitations
of cable economy was a distressing factor. Excerpted from their
context of larger purposes, the isolated news events — the slaughter
of grain collectors here, the execution of alleged kulaks elsewhere,
the arrest of a few hundred more “speculators” — seemed too harsh.
I envied the special correspondents of individual newspapers who

hallelujah! 97

could cable lengthy explanations. But I deluged my editors with
“think pieces” interpreting these events, every interpretation an
undisguised justification echoing the official press. Mine was the
satisfaction of being at once on the side of the authorities and on
the side of the righteous. It is a comfortable and heart-warming
position that encourages observers anywhere to give those in power
the benefit of every doubt.

2

That first winter was an exceptionally bitter one, even by Mos-
cow weather standards. Waiting on queues for bread and other
necessities was that much more agonizing. Everywhere these
ragged lines, chiefly of women, stretched from shop doors, under
clouds of visible breath; patient, bovine, scarcely grumbling. Pri-
vate trade channels were being rapidly shut off, before the gov-
ernment was able to replace them with official channels. Manu-
factured goods of the type that flowed from artisan families fell
to a dribble and soon dried up entirely. New pressures were being
applied to the more industrious, more unscrupulous, and more
prosperous peasants, and the flow of meat, fowl and other food-
stuffs from the surrounding countryside slowed down perceptibly
with every passing day.

The authorities did not hide their deep concern over the hostil-
ity of peasants to the official plans for “collecting” grain — that is,
for purchasing it at government prices, regarded by the villages
as outright confiscation. The disparity between the prices of farm
products and manufactured goods, the so-called “scissors,” had
long been a deterrent to peasant production. If they could not
exchange their rubles for boots, matches, salt, textiles, kerosene,
the peasants had small incentive to grow more grain than they
needed for themselves and their animals. As the capitalistic out-
lets were blocked and compulsion increasingly used to extract
grain from the growers at official prices, the peasants simply re-
stricted sowings and concealed the size of their crops.

Bread, which constitutes the larger half of the ordinary Rus-
sian’s diet, became a “deficit product.” This, in turn, obliged the
desperate authorities to exercise more force on the peasants. The
vicious circle was a tightening noose around the government’s
throat.

98 hallelujah!

The outside world had accepted Stalin’s victory over Trotsky
as marking a swing to the Right. It was Trotsky who had warned
against the emergence of a new capitalist class in the villages and
demanded that the extra-legal repressions used against Nepmen,
the urban bourgeoisie, be extended to richer, so-called kulak ele-
ments in the country 3 he who had demanded a speedy, planned in-
dustrialization of the country. The world was wrong. No sooner
had the success of the Stalin machine — what Trotsky called the
“dictatorship of the secretariat” — been completed, than the Krem-
lin stole Trotsky’s thunder by turning on the kulaks.

Russians were as surprised by this turn of affairs as the outside
world. Having been happily freed of the bugaboo, Trotsky, they
were confronted with much worse: his policies being put into
effect by a more centralized and more ruthless dictatorship under
Stalin.

The most astonished and chagrined of all in this about-face
were those Bolshevik leaders jyho were not content to be rid of
Trotsky, but honestly opposed his Leftist notions. Men like Alexis
Rykov, the head of the government, and Mikhail Tomsky,* the
head of the trade unions, and Nikolai Bukharin, f the outstanding
theorist in the Party line-up, suddenly found their leader, Stalin,
in some of the very political positions from which Trotsky had
been forcibly ejected. In a sense they remained true Stalinists
when Stalin himself veered suddenly to the Left. In remaining
faithful to Stalin’s earlier views, they were to become, by the end
of 1928, a new anti-Stalin faction, the so-called Right Opposition.

When the Kremlin carried its new socialist offensive into the
villages, the peasantry fought back with the only weapon at its
disposal. It refused to feed the pampered cities and armies. In
1 9 19-21 its tactics of non-cooperation had forced Lenin to abandon
military communism in favor of the New Economic Policy. These
tactics were now revived, and the country, in the midst of its
growing food shortage, watched uneasily the gigantic tussle be-
tween an organized state and some hundred million of its citi-
zens. Government grain collections (the pretense of voluntary
sales to the official collectors was belied by the very use of this

* Committed suicide in August, 1936.

fi Arrested in 1937.

hallelujah! 99

word) fell off alarmingly. The exportable surplus disappeared —
the name “Bread Export Trust” on a building across the street
from the Grand Hotel became the target of half-illicit political
gibes. And the bread lines grew longer, drearier, more sullen
throughout the land.

The government retaliated with a series of what it called
euphemistically “extraordinary measures.” They amounted to con-
fiscation of grain supplies in many instances reminiscent of the
methods of military communism. Red troops were sent into the
more intractable villages to halt leakage of grain through private
channels. Bread “bazaars” that had operated legally in the towns
were closed down. The state’s agents were instructed to meet their
quotas of grain collections by any means, and dozens of them paid
with their lives for the attempt.

The political legend then started and since raised to the dignity
of official history is of a peasantry divided, with the government
championing the poor peasants against their exploiting kulak neigh-
bors. The simple fact is that the countryside, except for an in-
consequential group of baitraksy or landless peasants, was a solid
phalanx in opposing the government. Under Nep, for the first
time almost in Russian history, the vast majority acquired land
that it could call its own and had not the slightest inclination to
relinquish it.

For some time the press veiled the intensity of the conflict
with generalizations about “kulak resistance” and the need for
“Bolshevik vigilance.” Moscow buzzed with rumors of localized
rebellion in the Kuban, Ukraine, and other sections ; of workers
goaded by food shortage into striking — and strikes under Soviet
conditions are equivalent to rebellion. When the press was per-
mitted to speak more openly, many of the rumors appeared to
be true. From all sections of the country came reports of local
communists, visiting grain agents, and tax collectors assaulted
and murdered. One official estimate, I recall, placed the mur-
dered communists at more than five hundred. Batches of kulaks
and “kulak agents” were summarily executed for counter-revo-
lution.

Though few of us realized it, we were witness to the opening
battle in a war that, with brief armistices, was to culminate in the
famine of 1932-33.

ioo hallelujah!

That Stalin and his advisers took an earnest view of the danger-
ous conflict may be surmised from the fact that by July the
Kremlin formally admitted that its extra-legal methods had been
a serious “error.” It pledged solemnly that the error would not
be repeated. Outwardly, peasant non-cooperation seemed to have
scored another victory— the last in its tragic history. For a few
months it looked as if Right sentiment might prevail, after all.

This agrarian struggle provided the melancholy background for
everything else that transpired in the country. It was the dismal
setting for the first sensational sabotage trial which began in May,
for the relentless campaign against critics of Stalin in the ranks
of the Party, for the intensified persecution of Nepmen. The kulak
opposition, dramatized in assassinations on one side and mass execu-
tions on the other, provided a plausible popular explanation for
bread and other food shortage. The bugaboo of industrial sabotage
was its counterpart in explaining shortage of manufactured goods.
In both instances the struggle was reported in terms of bloody war-
fare and with small regard for facts. Every official news item
was a communique from the war fronts and its purpose was to
maintain fighting morale.

I had certainly reached the new Russia at a critical stage in its
career.

3

Spring turned the snows to mud and stripped housefronts, cob-
blestones and cluttered back-yards of their merciful winter swath-
ings to reveal the drabness underneath. The miniature sleighs
disappeared overnight to be replaced by decrepit, knock-kneed
droshkies. Days grew longer and nights more limpid. Shawls
gave way to red and white flowered handkerchiefs; misshapen
padded coats and sheepskins were shed for less grotesque if no
less patched garments. The girls outside the “family baths” and
on the Tverskaya smoked their cigarettes and paced their beats
less morosely. On clear evenings the strains of accordions floated
over the boulevards and couples promenaded slowly, silently,
hands interlaced in front of them and heads touching.

As May Day approached, innumerable pictures and busts of
Stalin, Lenin, Karl Marx, Voroshilov and other leaders, living
and dead, suddenly filled the shop windows; gigantic wood and

IOI

HALLELUJAH !

cardboard representations of workers, peasants, and soldiers and
models of machines and factories blossomed at the main intersec-
tions. Creepers of red bunting proliferated across the houses, in-
scribed with boasts and threats and promises.

American tourists, the first swallows as harbingers of the holi-
day season, alighted in the hotel lobbies, twittering excitedly of
creches and museums and factories. They called one another
and every Russian in their vicinity “comrade” with such deep
childlike relish and looked at everything around them with the
hypnotized eyes of lovers. Though the International was in their
souls, they listened to the Grand Hotel band play Hallelujah
raucously and interminably.

This American jazz song for some unaccountable reason cap-
tured and held the Russian fancy for years after it had been for-
gotten in America} it was literally inescapable, being played ear-
nestly for entertainment and ironically as symbol of bourgeois
decadence.

In 1928 the American tourists were almost entirely Russian
Jews returning for a glimpse of their native land and communists
on pilgrimage to Mecca. The more lucrative invasion by the mid-
dle classes and the rich did not get well started until two years
later, when the depression made them more susceptible to Soviet
preachings. But already there were anxiously heretical profes-
sors, atheists in search of a religion, old maids in search of revo-
lutionary compensations, radicals in search of reenforcement for
a wavering faith: the types that were to grow so boringly familiar
to me in the next years.

The last evenings of April the skies over Moscow were in-
carnadined with the reflection of thousands of red lights illuminat-
ing streets and show-windows, framing huge portraits of the lead-
ers, spelling out defiance of Austen Chamberlain and other ene-
mies. Extra food supplies had been concentrated in the cooperative
stores. The press was loud with optimism. Radio horns blared
martial music on the public squares. The streets echoed to the tread
of throngs in a holiday mood— a mood expertly evoked by all
the tricks of ballyhoo and patriotism. Billy and I mixed in the
crowds and beat time mentally to the marching songs.

Earlier that month we had made a round of the churches on
Easter Eve. We had seen the believers march, chanting, behind

102

HALLELUJAH !

bearded long-haired priests in their magnificent vestments, behind
acolytes in shimmering white; each of them shielded a lighted
taper against the wind. We had watched them intoning fervently
“Christ is risen!” and kissing their neighbors. They were not
molested, but everywhere there were knots of unfriendly, sneer-
ing onlookers. By contrast with May Day Eve, the Easter cere-
monies were pallid. Insofar as the Orthodox faith was a pageant,
it could not long compete against the official pageantry.

On May Day, the tourists were deployed on both sides of
Lenin’s tomb. They thrilled to the massive display of military
strength, the rumbling tanks, the armored cars, the machineguns
and searchlights, the airplanes buzzing overhead. They cheered
the horsemen galloping across the square in mass formations at a
furious pace, shouting hurrahs that plucked echoes from the clouds,
the horses 7 hooves striking sparks from the cobblestones. Then
they saw the armed workers, the Red Cross divisions, and the
hours-long flood of humanity under banners and floats, cheering
and singing and cheering again. Stalin and his principal lieutenants
stood on the wooden ramparts of the Lenin Mausoleum, smiling,
saluting, chatting. The slogans and floats this May Day attacked
Austen Chamberlain, kulaks and saboteurs — the enemies abroad
and the enemies at home.

There was little in this standardized scene to give strangers
an inkling of the volcanic forces under the surface, and of the
impending struggles. If there were hints of the strained situation
in agriculture and industry, outsiders were neither equipped nor
in a state of mind to read them. The tourists and labor delega-
tions returned home to spill their superlatives in newspaper in-
terviews or at dinner tables, smugly ignorant of what was going
on behind the scenes of the greatest show on earth.

I was caught up by the sweep and magnitude of May Day —
of revolutionary Moscow in its holiday character, loud, brightly
lit, defiant, in military formation. Immense quadrangles of Red
soldiers taking the oath of fealty. The Kremlin cannon firing
salutes. Hurrahs that rolled through Red Square like waves.
Above all, the masses marching across the enclosed space, their
eyes and minds fixed on Stalin. Newsreels have made this scene
familiar to the whole world, but they can only echo faintly the

hallelujah! 103

thunder of released emotion that shakes a sympathetic newcomer
plunged into the scene for the first time.

Not until the Nazis in Germany took over the mass demonstra-
tion technique and carried it even further was there anything
in the world to compare with Soviet parades. They have been
mistakenly described as exhibitions of loyalty and popular en-
thusiasm, as though they were merely like conventional parades in
other countries, but on an immensely larger scale. Nothing can
be farther from the truth.

These Soviet parades are rather demonstrations of the govern-
ment’s organized and disciplined strength. I saw New York go
wild with fervor in welcoming the armistice, and then in wel-
coming Lindbergh home after his flight to Paris. Those were great
tides of emotion, unorganized and unrestrained, dissipating their
strength as they pounded against the city’s skyscrapers. What
makes a Moscow demonstration more imposing and more ominous
by contrast is its complete organization: the tides are on leash
and the leash is in the grip of a small group on Red Square.
A million roaring men and women uncontrolled is one thing. The
same million in battalions under banners, meekly waiting their turn
for hours for the privilege and duty of crossing one square, pass-
ing one spot, glimpsing one leader — that is quite another thing.

Moscow demonstrations are infinitely more than parades — and
a good deal less. They are reviews of fighting forces, a counting
of heads. The slogans are in no sense a spontaneous expression of
public opinion. They have been carefully selected and announced
by the ruling group in formal edicts. Not simply the subject
matter, but the precise wording has been officially prescribed. The
synthetic enthusiasms and hatreds have been meticulously appor-
tioned among the objects of approval or abomination at home
and abroad. Whether the inscription on a strip of bunting means
anything to the men who hold it aloft is never certain, since they
did not themselves choose it. The only certainty is that they are
sufficiently disciplined to hold it aloft.

Journalists who find a reflection of popular attitudes in ban-
ners and red bunting and cardboard insults to the Kremlin’s
enemies are either fooling themselves or their readers. What they
see reflects only the attitudes of the governing minority. How
far the prescribed emotions correspond with the real emotions of

io4 hallelujah!

the marching masses — and whether it makes any difference as
long as they do march — it is for every observer to calculate as best
he can.

In my first parade, of course, I did not raise such quibbles. As
far as I was concerned every slogan came straight from the hearts
of those who carried it across Red Square before Stalin’s review-
ing stand. Around me in the section immediately to the right
of the Lenin Mausoleum were the foreign diplomats and news-
papermen. But I felt myself a stranger among them. I belonged
with the radical delegations in other and more crowded sections
and in my heart echoed their every hallelujah.

V. Censorship

MY WORKING day began usually with the reading of the morn-
ing papers, which in this topsy-turvy land appear in the morn-
ing*

The Soviet press is officially owned and more rigidly controlled
than any other of the state properties. It is frankly and proudly
a kept press — kept by the government, the Communist Party,
the trade-unions, which are but different names for the same cen-
tralized power. The very memory of an “independent” news-
paper, in serious disagreement with the government, has faded
out.

Every sentence in every paper has been censored. Not merely
what it actually says but the inflections and overtones of its dreaded
voice are political weather-vanes to the initiate. Its very silences
are portentous. An editorial is the equivalent of an official pro-
nunciamento. The faint hint of a new attitude toward some sector
of the population in a random article may foreshadow destiny for
millions. The kind of news published, the stress placed on an oc-
currence, the failure to mention certain events at home or abroad,
all have an importance they do not possess where the press k
relatively free.

The whole ethical baggage of journalism in democratic coun-
tries has been thrown overboard by the Bolsheviks. No claim is
made for “unbiased” or “objective” reporting. No pretense is made
of newspaper independence and no reference is ever made to the
freedom or dignity of the Fourth Estate. All this baggage, in fact,
the communists regard as a piece of bourgeois hypocrisy. The press
is not primarily a conveyor of news at all. It is first of all an
agency of the Soviet regime in accomplishing its political and
economic objectives. Its full force is always focused upon the
achievement of specific practical results.

In the editorial offices on the top floor of the slate-gray five-

105

io6 hallelujah!

story Izvestia building, a prominent Russian newspaperman was
explaining this to me one evening.

a But how about truth and facts?” I prodded him. “Here am I,
a stranger in your midst. What you print is my chief source of
information. Can I believe it?”

“If it’s printed, ids truth for us. We don’t know and don’t
care about bourgeois notions of facts. We Soviet journalists are
not just reporters. We don’t boast of standing above the turmoil
like recording angels. On the contrary, we are in the thick of the
fight, pioneers in the job of changing our country. If certain in-
formation retards this work, we would be crazy to print it. As far
as we are concerned, it is then neither news nor truth. It becomes
plain counter-revolution.”

“Well,” I smiled, “maybe that explains the first political anec-
dote I heard in your country. I understand that it’s your oldest
and best-known popular Soviet joke. I refer — ”

He laughed.

“I know, I know. There is no truth in the News ( Izvestia ) and
no news in the Truth ( Pravda ).”

The surface of the Soviet press is painfully drab and monotonous.
When news and views are prescribed from a central source there
is small margin for originality of style or content. The stilted
repetitious language of the Party “theses” prevails throughout,
since safety for the news writer and commentator lies in conformity.
Originality, even as to the phrasing of a thought, is dangerously
on the borderline of heresy. Why risk a startling metaphor or
an individual turn of thought when the orthodox formulation of
every current theme, from the campaign to raise more potatoes
to the drive to liquidate a million kulak families, is at hand?

But once you learn to break through the dull surface, the
press becomes a mine of surprises and excitements. In some casual
phrase you may discover a clew to a puzzling chain of events. A
minor item out of Kuban or Georgia or Turkestan may prove a
peep-hole through which a whole region and its struggles are
visible. The tone of an editorial comment or the fact that some-
one’s name is mentioned again after a long silence, the routine
announcement of the removal of one official or the appointment
of another, imply, for those who know the code, thrilling news
affecting the lives of the entire population.

CENSORSHIP

107

The perusal of the day’s sheaf of newspapers and the analysis
of the news grist that it yields were therefore a challenge to my
intuition about news and a constant test of my comprehension
of the Soviet scene. My first duty to my job, I soon realized,
was to learn to decipher the newspapers, to recognize the solid
facts behind official euphemisms, the accent of an article as some-
thing distinct from its ostensible contents.

In the first months I was almost wholly dependent upon my
interpreter and secretary, the phlegmatic Miss Jmudskaya. But
gradually I learned to read Russian and, more important, to read
between the lines. The press in a dictated country, whatever the
high professions of the dictators, is a thick curtain to obscure
the facts, but it always has fissures and accidental peep-holes for
the practiced reader. The Russian people themselves had become
sensitive to the overtones of their press. They fed their hopes
and their fears on published hints and innuendoes, discounting
the surface of statistics and formulas.

The foreign correspondent of the legend is a virile swash-
buckling fellow who obtains sensational news by the exercise of
daring and dexterity in the whispering galleries of diplomacy,
occasionally in scented boudoirs, and always at great risk to his
neck. That glamorous legend sheds its rays even on the humblest
in my trade. The unromantic fact, however, is that the average
correspondent cribs three-quarters of his news from the local news-
papers. The fourth quarter he draws from official handouts, the
mendacities of paid tipsters, and his own fertile imagination.

It is his skill in recognizing the significant item or his deftness
in making it sound significant to a distant audience that chiefly
distinguishes the superior foreign reporter from his plodding un-
inspired colleagues. There may be correspondents who wind up
their particular capitals before going to bed to keep them run-
ning and who tell premiers where they get off, but I have yet
to meet them outside of novels. Those whom I have met and
watched at work are much too busy deciphering papers and chasing
hot tips and doing other low-down chores to spare the time and
energy to run the local governments.

Any attempt to throw an aura of romance around the corre-
spondents for press agencies (as distinguished from those repre-
senting indiyidual newspapers) is especially thankless. To fie-

108 hallelujah!

tioneers seeking a foreign correspondent for the role of hero, I
recommend earnestly that they avoid the press agency man like the
plague. The poor fellow is much too hard-worked and under too
heavy a nervous strain for heroic nonsense. He is eternally racing
against the clock} every split second counts heavily in the re-
lentless competition among the news wholesalers. The special
writer, being a retailer, gathers his facts and weaves them quietly
into a connected story; he may even add a little fancy embroidery
of his own guess-work. But the agency man can hold no scrap of
information for later use. It must be flashed forthwith. The scraps
are assembled hastily by the home editor and the finished story
reflects neither the sender’s thought nor manner.

2

I can testify that the press agency correspondent is the slavey
of the profession, perpetually tethered to the sending end of the
cable, fighting against time. In the sense that I never dared to
be out of touch with my home, which was also my office, I worked
twenty-fours hours a day. There was no “deadline” after which
I could relax — every minute is the deadline for a United Press
client somewhere on the globe. I filed news directly to New York,
London, Berlin and Tokyo each of which in turn distributed it
to its area of operation.

A thousand times in these years I abandoned an opera or a
party or a poker game, always at the most exciting point, of course,
in response to a summons from the Foreign Office Press Depart-
ment. I found a dozen other correspondents similarly torn away
from their various sacred or profane activities. After long wait-
ing we were rewarded, as likely as not, with a dull communique
about President Kalinin’s reception to the new Afghan pleni-
potentiary, the lack of progress in Kamchatka fishery negotiations,
or some other item unlikely to excite my readers.

Merely by way of filling the cup of our travail to overflowing
the communiques were often issued to us at the home of one or
another of the censors, rather than at the Foreign Office. Under
Moscow housing conditions these functionaries were scarcely at
fault if they lived in distant and inaccessible corners of the city.
But it meant that the representatives of the press of the entire

CENSORSHIP

IO9

civilized world must leave bar or bed to foregather in an out-
lying part of the capital in the tiny flat of a censor for the boon
of a mimeographed, half-legible document that sometimes made
history but most times did not even make sense.

One such scene remains etched on my memory. The whole
world was waiting anxiously for an expression of Soviet sentiment
on a matter of foreign affairs of major international import. For
days we had begged and clamored for it in vain. Finally it came
through, in the form of an Izvestia editorial. In consideration
of its critical significance, the editorial was made available to us
the night before it reached the news-stands. Hundreds of millions
of readers in a score of nations, perusing the solemn dispatches
soon thereafter would have been shocked if they could see the
setting in which the Soviet Union transmitted its message to the
world. Two dozen correspondents of many nationalities and their
secretaries, equipped with portable typewriters and none too ami-
able after the midnight trek to a faraway alley, were jammed into
the tiny rooms of one of the censors. The censor, symbol at the
moment of a great nation’s might, was in bathrobe and slippers ;
on the other side of a partition one of his children was crying
plaintively; every so often his wife, sleepy-eyed and in a frayed
negligee, plopped by on her way to or from the kitchen. The
promised editorial was two hours late in arriving. The world
press camped there amidst the censor’s domestic intimacies until
it did arrive.

It was as a physical nuisance that the correspondents resented
the censorship, even more than as a professional barrier. A dis-
patch required the signature and official seal of the Press Depart-
ment before it would be accepted at the central telegraph office.
We thought with deep envy of cities where one wrote out his
dispatch, pressed a button, and the process was completed. In
Moscow, every message must first be carried to the Foreign Office.
There one waited until the censor, who was usually importantly in
conference, was good and ready to read the projected dispatch.
Its precise wording having been bargained over, passages deleted,
and compromise formulas found for telling the news while blur-
ring its meaning, it must be carried to the one window in the one
telegraph office authorized to accept press dispatches for transmis-
sion.

no hallelujah!

Should it become necessary to send a news story during the
hours when the censors were off duty or retired for the night,
they must be trailed to their hiding places or routed out of bed
for the indispensable signature and seal. These harassed officials,
stalked and badgered by the foreign reporters, may easily be for-
given if they were less than hospitable at our intrusions.

Except for the attendant physical annoyances, the censorship
did not seem to me at all stringent. Most of my dispatches passed
muster so easily that I could only wonder why certain of my
colleagues fussed and fumed at the restraint. The editorial changes
suggested by Rothstein, Podolsky, or another of the censors, were
usually, I thought, reasonable and often positively helpful. Some-
times I felt that they had saved me from cabling implied criti-
cisms of the Soviet regime into which I had been betrayed by an
extravagant adjective or a too literal reading of the news.

No censorship anywhere seems harsh to a reporter who agrees
enthusiastically with the viewpoint of the censors. That was ap-
proximately my situation. I collaborated readily with the Press
Department in rewording a piece of news so as to take the sting
out of it: the department had developed a genius for bland equivo-
cation in any of the world’s major languages. I wrote a number
of feature stories, in fact, on the mildness of the Soviet censor-
ship as compared to the stringency of those in Italy and other
countries.

A basic rule-of-thumb in the Press Department was that we
could cable anything which was published in the Soviet press
because it had already passed internal censorships. Since I ac-
cepted this published material without much question, my messages
met little opposition.

Correspondents were grouped in official eyes into “friendly”
and “unfriendly,” rather than truthful and lying. Not their ve-
racity but their attitude toward the Soviet government was the
measure of their character. I was distinctly and proudly “friendly”
and more than willing to go out of my way to prove my title to the
classification. My quarrels with the censors were largely on matters
of rhetoric. The dictates of cable economy forced me to condense
events so closely that they sounded starker, more brutal than I
intended. I sighed for the freedom of the special correspondents
who could write around an unpleasant new decree, instead of

CENSORSHIP

I I I

blurting it out in one blunt sentence so easily misunderstood by
the hostile capitalist environment. How I envied the New York
Times man in particular! There was no rigid cable quota to cramp
his style and he had no economic or other inhibitions in display-
ing his erudition and conversational charms at fifteen cents a word.
The same decree padded in classical allusions, reminiscences of
the World War, and references to the French Revolution did
not strike the New York readers quite so hard.

A batch of my articles on American themes were published by
Soviet magazines. The foremost literary publication, Krasnaya
Nov y y gave some twenty of its earnest, closely printed pages to
my description of periodical literature in America. It was a whim-
sical piece, satirizing the “true story” magazines which had given
me a living for a period, the pseudo-intellectual monthlies rum-
maging timidly in the capitalist chaos, the million-circulation
magazines that filled the interstices between soap advertisements
with gooey romance. The Journal of Foreign Literature , then
edited by Sergei Dinamov, ran several of my articles on American
literature. Others used vignettes of the American scene.

For four years I had seen my dispatches from New York in the
Soviet newspapers, but always under the imprimature of Tass.
It was thrilling now to see articles in influential Russian publica-
tions under my own signature, and my name listed casually, as
of right, in the tables of contents among Soviet authors. The
thrill derived, no doubt, from this proof in black-and-white that
I still “belonged” in the Russian revolution. The rebuffs from
communists had wounded me more deeply than I cared to admit
to myself. With my name cheek-by-jowl with Gorky’s or Kolt-
zov’s or Dinamov’s, I was not wholly outcast despite my equivo-
cal position as capitalist reporter.

Sergei Dinamov, one of the editors with whom I dealt, was
a young man of considerable personal charm. His friendship
was a pleasant element in our first Moscow year. He was lanky,
spectacled, studious and soft-spoken, cut out by nature to be a
provincial pedagogue. Though I liked him for other qualities,
I was not impressed with his cultural or mental equipment for
the calling of literary critic. This needs mentioning because in due
time he achieved editorship of the politically dominant art pub-

I 12 hallelujah!

lication, the Literaturnaya Gazetta . His rise among the literary
dictators seemed to me in time an indictment of that period.

My Sacco- Vanzetti biography was published twice in Russia,
under different titles and under circumstances that were embar-
rassing to the author. The first publication, in an edition of ten
thousand copies, was by the Moscow publishing trust, Zemlya i
Fahrika (Land and Factory), arrangements having been made by
Yonov, the director of the trust. The book was warmly com-
mended in the press and the edition was exhausted in a few days.

Soon thereafter I was visited by two excited representatives of
a Leningrad publishing organization, Krasnaya Gazetta . They
informed me that they were in a distressing situation. Without
realizing either that the author was in their midst or that Zemlya i
Fahrika was publishing it, their trust had translated my book from
its German version.

“In fact, we have printed 120,000 copies,” they told me. “Ids
all ready, needing only to be bound. Suddenly we discover that
Yonov has published another edition, and that you are in Rus-
sia. Well, now we cannot proceed without your explicit permis-
sion. If you don’t give it to us, comrade, we will be in trouble, lots
of trouble!”

“I have no objections,” I assured them. “On the contrary.
But will Zemlya i Fahrika have anything against it?”

“No, no,” one of them laughed at such an absurd notion,
“they and we — all part of the same governmental enterprise. This
isn’t New York or Paris, you know. There’s no capitalist competi-
tion.”

Though I did not doubt them, I tried to reach Yonov. Un-
fortunately he had gone off to the Caucasus on vacation — Rus-
sians always do at critical moments. Under renewed pressure and
reassurances that the procedure was entirely ethical, I finally gave
the Leningrad men a written authorization. When Yonov re-
turned, the storm broke over my head. He charged that the
Leningrad emissaries had lied, that I had betrayed him in al-
lowing them to issue my book, etc.

“There’s a strong demand for your book,” he taunted me, “but
I shall not allow any more editions to be printed!”

It was my first discovery that competition between two organi-

CENSORSHIP I 13

zations within the Soviet structure could become almost as bit-
ter and ruthless as under capitalism.

My career as a Russian author foundered, like so many things
in Russia, on the rock of fear — in this case the Russians 5 fear
of contact with a foreigner. A magazine editor telephoned to in-
quire whether a promised article was ready.

“Yes, I am just finishing it, 55 I told him. “If you come right
over, I 5 11 have it waiting for you. 55

He fumbled and stammered and finally decided on honesty as
the best policy.

“Well, you understand, I would gladly come, 55 he said, “in
fact, I should enjoy coming over and chatting with you. No nye
udobno — but it is not convenient. 55

I was becoming thoroughly familiar with that phrase. It meant
that for political reasons it was not quite safe for him, a Soviet
editor, to be seen entering or leaving the home of a foreign cor-
respondent. Nye udobno! My temper got the better of my sym-
pathy.

“It 5 s all right to publish my writing, but it 5 s inconvenient to be
seen in my company, is that it? My thoughts are acceptable, but
my person is contagious. Well, you can go plumb to hell! 55

I wrote no more articles for the Soviet press.

VI. Demonstration Trial

THE morning of May 18, 1928, was the color of lead. The
gloomy weather did not dampen the circus spirit of the crowds
milling around the squat, neo-classic structure once called the
Nobles Club and now called the House of Trade Unions. A
spirit of festival touched with hysteria — a crowd come to see a
righteous hanging. Fifty Russian and three German technicians
and engineers from the coal industry were to be tried publicly on
charges of counter-revolutionary sabotage and espionage.

Militiamen labored to keep people in line and forced a pas-
sage for those of us lucky enough to hold special passes. In the
spacious Hall of Columns, there was an atmosphere of carnival.
Crowds poured in noisily and jockeyed for advantageous seats.
The boxes gradually filled with diplomats, influential officials
and other privileged spectators — much bowing and hand-shaking.
Sputtering Jupiter lights played on the scene, photographers and
cinema cameramen maneuvered their equipment into position,
nearly a hundred foreign and Soviet reporters settled down at
the foot of the high rostrum. Only a row of trimly uniformed
G.P.U. soldiers, at rigid attention in front of the prisoners’ box,
their fixed bayonets glinting in the floodlights, added a note of
grimness to the carnival.

The gleaming white marble columns had sprouted ugly clus-
ters of loud-speakers. Immense crystal chandeliers shimmered in
the shifting lights. But the dominant note was a blatant red — red
cloths on the tables on the platform, red inscriptions on the walls.

The Shakhty sabotage trial was about to begin: the first of
the melodramatic “demonstration trials” which year after year
were to bewilder the world with their spectacle of men confess-
ing incredible crimes and embracing death with grandiloquent
gestures.

For over two months the Soviet press, radio, official speeches
had built up towards the climax of this show. Dark hints of

DEMONSTRATION TRIAL I I 5

enemies within conniving with enemies abroad, villainy that cut
production and took food out of the mouths of hungering masses,
treachery that threatened the socialist fatherland — all brought to
a sharp focus at last in this case. In recent months there had been
many laconic announcements of executions for economic counter-
revolution — here at last was a public demonstration of the rea-
sons for such extreme measures. The Shakhty men were pil-
loried not merely for their own misdeeds, but for the crimes
of the whole embittered, rebellious intelligentsia.

The tightening pinch of goods and food shortage was making
people grumble with pain. The ruthless extermination of Trot-
skyism and other communist deviations was eating into the faith
of more conscious workers. The Shakhty trial offered a tangible
object for the hatreds smoldering in the heart of Russia. That
morning’s newspapers in every city and town shrieked curses
upon the bourgeois plotters and their bloodthirsty foreign con-
federates. Week after week the press, radio, schools, newsreels,
billboards had waved the promise of traitors’ deaths aloft like
crimson flags. They had treated every accusation and every far-
fetched implication as established facts.

This was no spick-and-span trial on the democratic model, with
its hypocritical blindfolded Justice dangling a silly pair of scales.
This was Revolutionary Justice, its flaming eyes wide open, its
flaming sword poised to strike. It was the same Revolutionary
Justice that had presided over the guillotine in the French Ter-
ror, that had ruled men’s minds whenever tyranny was over-
thrown. Its voice was not the whining of “fairness” but the thun-
der of vengeance. The charges would not be proved — the “pre-
liminary investigations” behind closed doors presumably had
done that. There was a sheaf of full or partial confessions that
fitted neatly one into the other. No, the charges would merely be
“demonstrated” before the whole country and the whole world,
as theatrically as a powerful government with all the whips of
mass indignation in its clenched fist could manage.

The accused men were coming into court pre-judged. Many
of them had made fulsome confessions. And yet, there was surely
a wide margin of the unpredictable. When half a hundred men
are corailed for an ordeal of death in the sight of the entire
world, the best-planned melodrama may go askew. Even Rus-

x I 6 HALLELUJAH !

sians might refuse to die meekly, minds might crack, neat pat-
terns might crumble, unsuspected peaks of courage or abysses
of cowardice might be uncovered. Who knows what might hap-
pen! The crowds therefore pushed and clamored for. a glimpse
of the proceedings. It was the first large-scale public trial in some
years and stirred the embers of the sacrificial romantic moods of
the earliest years of the revolution.

Nikolai Krylenko,* the prosecutor, was the first to stride to the
platform. He took in the spectators, the foreign reporters, the
cinema paraphernalia, and radio microphones with a slow, defiant
scowl. This was to be his show. A small, tightly knit athletic figure,
only a few inches over five feet, with a large shaven head and
a flat face, he saw himself and made others see him as revolu-
tionary vengeance incarnate. Throughout the six crowded weeks
of the trial he wore sports clothes— riding breeches, puttees, a
hunting jacket. We called it a hunting outfit and its fitness for
his role added to the drama of the proceedings. Krylenko, the
man-hunter.

Then came Professor A. Y. Vishinsky, the blond, spectacled
presiding judge. He sat behind a microphone on a raised dais,
with two associate judges on either side of him. The defense law-
yers, older men with something tentative and apologetic in their
manners, took seats and fussed with brief cases and papers to cover
their embarrassment. Their faces have faded out of. my memory j
they were timid supernumeraries, an empty concession to appear-
ances. Then the accused men filed in and took seats in the fenced-
off space: a motley collection of old men and young, gray, un-
smiling. Ten or twelve of them were to emerge in the follow-
ing weeks as distinct personalities, but the rest remained a blur
of names and faces.

The Jupiter lights snarled and flashed as they were turned full
on the judges, the defendants, the audience. Their glare and sput-
ter rarely ceased. It was the raucous, distracting element in which
the entire trial was immersed.

The names of the accused men were read off by the clerk and
acknowledged from the prisoners’ box. Every session began with
this ceremony of roll-call. Suddenly there was a hitch. Prisoner
Nekrasoff did not answer. There were only fifty-two men instead
of fifty-three. His counsel explained that Nekrasoff, unfortunately,

* Reported arrested for alleged counterrevolution in 1937*

DEMONSTRATION TRIAL I 17

was suffering hallucinations and had been placed in a padded cell,
where he screamed about rifles pointed at his heart and suffered
paroxysms.

The vision of Nekrasoff howling in his padded cell was a sinister
element that deepened with every passing day. Every so often, in
the routine of questions and answers and quibbles, some casual
statement or incident would thus light up the depths. Sometimes
these flashes left us limp with the impact of horrors half-glimpsed.
What had driven the man to madness? What had transpired in
the G.P.U. dungeons and interrogation chambers in the months
since the men were rounded up? How did men like Krylenko,
who sneered and snarled while the world looked on, behave when
there were no witnesses and no public records? Whenever the
proceedings yielded a flitting glimpse of that mysterious back-
ground, the spectators were electrified, the judges leaned for-
ward, the prisoners fidgeted, Krylenko tensed for a spring. . . .

The long Act of Accusation was read. It had been published
in full, a quarter of a million words, in the leading newspapers
and was familiar to us. But in the courtroom, within the shadow
of death, it sounded infinitely more ominous. It described an or-
ganized network of sabotage and espionage, with centers in Mos-
cow and Kharkov, Warsaw, Berlin and Paris 5 emissaries carry-
ing instructions and money from expropriated mine owners abroad
to Russian engineers in the Donetz Basin coal area where Shakhty
was located^ technicians spoiling machinery, undermining the revo-
lution’s fuel supplies, inveigling the Soviet government into waste-
ful expenditures; preparations to destroy the coal industry as soon
as war or intervention started} German firms palming off defec-
tive machinery with the connivance of bribed engineers.

Here was international plotting on the grand scale: revolu-
tionary Russia pitted against a hostile world, intriguing capitalists
and nefarious emigres and desperate agents gnawing at the eco-
nomic vitality of the land. The cliches of political rhetoric — -the
“hostile capitalist environment,” the “class enemy in our midst,”
the “dastardly saboteurs, plotters, spies” — were bodied forth in a
superb drama, bolstered by confessions and documents. Ten of the
accused men had confessed and implicated the others. Six others
had made important admissions. The rest, including all three Ger-
mans, pleaded innocence. All the information had been dredged

1 1 8 hallelujah!

from their minds in secret “preliminary investigations/ 2 * * 5 the very
thought of which — such was the sinister reputation of the G.P.U.
— made Russians shudder.

It was an awesome picture that emerged from the Act of Ac-
cusation. In its general charges and larger contours it was strangely
convincing, particularly in this setting of radio microphones, red
drapery, bayonets, livid lights and newspaper hysteria. Only when
the document moved closer and focused on details did the pic-
ture seem to blur. The citations of specific words and acts were
curiously trifling, petty, inconsequential in relation to the grandiose
world-wide plots involving governments, gigantic private corpo-
rations, and a supposedly organized, heavily financed movement.
A turbine that went wrong. A mechanized mine which in someone’s
opinion should not have been mechanized. A raincoat sent from
Germany as a “signal” for sabotage. A servant girl whom some-
one else had supposedly denounced to the Whites. Where were
the magnificent deeds of desperation called for by the big pat-
tern? Throughout the long exhausting weeks we fluctuated thus
between vast accusations and the closer scrutiny under which they
dissolved into conjectures and hearsay.

We waited in vain for a genuine piece of impersonal and unim-
peachable testimony — an intercepted letter perhaps, a statement
or document that did not carry the suspicion of G.P.U. extortion.
The “far-reaching international intrigue” never did emerge. There
was ample evidence of individual chicanery and occasional col-
laboration, but hardly any conclusive proof of the organized,
centrally-directed conspiracy charged by the prosecution and as-
sumed to be a fact by the press.

2

I despair of summarizing the weeks of trial. It was a strain

on one’s nerves and credulity, watching men writhe under Kry-
lenko’s whip, watching them go one after another through their

roles like puppets while cameras were grinding and the Jupiters
hissed. Most fearful was the macabre miracle of puppets unex-
pectedly coming to life, struggling to escape their nooses, pro-
testing, accusing, pleading, while the prosecutor pulled the rope
tighter.

DEMONSTRATION TRIAL

1 1 9

The traditional Russian court procedure is far more casual and
informal than in the West and therefore provides more scope
for dramatic surprises. Long speeches are in order, witnesses con-
front and harangue one another, lawyers are unlimited in their
wiles in leading or misleading those whom they question. The
defendant is not guided and guarded by expert lawyers and pro-
tected by rules of procedure or an Anglo-Saxon assumption of
innocence. He is left to flail in a panic like a drowning man, or
to save himself cleverly, depending on his own abilities and ner-
vous make-up.

Each prisoner began with a statement of his career. A few of
them talked for more than an hour, tracing their life’s course from
birth to the impending death. Often they achieved real eloquence,
and even the most inarticulate among them occasionally found
words that lit up the vistas of his ordeal. I doubt if half a hundred
men from the same social layers in any other race could have done
so well as these Russians. Certainly no other race would have
offered so much natural histrionics. Those who confessed and
willingly played Krylenko’s game, tended to overplay their roles.
With an artist’s instinct for emphasis they built themselves into
arch-traitors, into personifications of the bourgeois intellectual
and everything communists despise. The Slavic talent for hyper-
bole was among the things most fully demonstrated in this demon-
stration trial.

Having told his whole story unimpeded, the prisoner was then
questioned by Krylenko, by his defense counsel, and brought face
to face with his accusers and with witnesses. He interrogated these
people himself and called upon others in the prisoners’ box for
corroboration. Often four or five defendants were grouped around
the microphone questioning one another, bickering over disputed
points and shouting “Liar!” while Krylenko and Vishinsky prodded
them expertly to involve one another. Often these men who had
spent their lives in equipping and operating coal mines grew more
excited in defending some technical point of minerology than in
defending their lives.

We saw the color ebbing from men’s faces, we saw horrified
disbelief staring from their eyes, as too-willing fellow-prisoners
calmly dragged them into their elaborate confessions. A web of
mutual hatreds and suspicions was woven under our eyes among

120 hallelujah!

the fifty-two prisoners, none of whom cared to die alone. We
watched the skill with which Krylenko, narrowing his eyes and
twisting his lips into a sneer, inflamed these hatreds, setting man
against man and sowing insinuations.

My job was to dash off bits of information that make headlines
in the American papers. A piece of extempore drama that would
provide a good feature somewhere among the department store
ads. A startling hint of foreign intervention plotted in a Berlin
cafe. The exciting confrontation of two prisoners, brothers or life-
long friends, that would make good human-interest stories. Some-
how I must wring more and better stories out of this performance
than my competitors.

But the dispatches did not begin to reflect the reality of that
tangle of passions, fears, suspicions and desperations. When I saw
my reports in type they seemed to me only vaguely related to the
Roman circus that I was witnessing. An American or English
reader must see the exotic spectacle through the lenses of his own
knowledge and experience, and these did not touch at many points
the emotions and overtones of the Soviet political trial.

Nor did the published dispatches so much as hint at my own
inner reactions or the disturbances set up in the deeper recesses of
my mind. I readily accepted the great trial for what it was: a
revolutionary gesture in which the concept of justice did not even
enter. It was a court-martial in the midst of a strenuous social war,
where ordinary notions of fairness must be suspended. We wrote
of evidence and witnesses and judicial rulings, fortifying the illu-
sion that this was, in a rough and strange way, a tribunal of jus-
tice. All the time I knew, as those around me knew, that the
innocence or guilt of these individuals was of no importance. It
was the indubitable guilt of their class that was being demonstrated.
What were the lives and the liberty of a few dozen men against
the interests of the revolution? They were merely a batch of ex-
hibits, the best that could be gathered at the moment, to impress
the populace with the fact that the revolution was still honey-
combed with enemies.

I accepted this version, as I say, as a working hypothesis and
did nothing consciously to throw doubts on the essential justice
of the thing in my readers’ minds. If their narrow, individualistic
code of justice was violated at every point, that larger justice which

DEMONSTRATION TRIAL

1 2 1

is Historical Necessity was being served. Not one of the Ameri-
can correspondents was naive enough to regard the performance
as in the literal sense a trial to assay men’s guilt. Not one of them
was so insensitive to the by-plays and under-currents as not to
be aware of the “defense” as a cruel farce, of threads leading into
mysterious Secret Service realms, and of purposes so far be-
yond the fate of the men in the prisoners’ box that they might
have been straw dummies instead of flesh and blood. If they
described the proceedings as though it were a genuine judicial
tribunal, it was because of the censorship, the necessity of living
on terms of friendship with the rulers of the capital where they
worked, the difficulty of making outsiders see the thing in any
other light — or a combination of these reasons.

As for myself, I counted it my specific duty to strengthen the
illusion abroad that this was, indeed, a court of justice in the
ordinary meaning of that phrase.

But I could not bring myself to hate the fifty-two men who
symbolized the capitalist enemy. My mind had been too deeply
conditioned by the years when I fought for justice to political
prisoners in America, by the reams of indignant words I had
written for I.W.W. prisoners, anarchist deportees, Charles Krieger
in Tulsa, Sacco and Vanzetti in Boston. Despite myself I came in-
creasingly, as the trial continued, to see the accused men as crea-
tures baited, badgered, insulted and denied a sporting chance. I
came increasingly to feel the demonstration trial as a hoax — not
merely on the outside world which received it naively as a species
of justice, but a hoax on the Russian masses themselves who were
being offered a lightning rod to divert their resentments.

3

Six of the men ultimately sentenced to die were reprieved as
reward for “services in elucidating the facts” — that is, for turn-
ing state’s evidence. It was principally through their enthusiastic,
well-rehearsed stories that the others were adjudged guilty. The
first prisoner to tell his story in the prescribed opening statements,
on the initial day of the trial, was of this company.

It was Berezovsky, a middle-aged engineer, tall and spare,
speaking calmly and with mounting emphasis. A full hour he

122 hallelujah!

talked into the microphone and his words echoed a careful, or-
ganized mind. He was extricating himself from death, with the
same skill and cold-blooded precision he might apply to solving
an engineering problem.

He was evidently put first on the list by Krylenko to serve
as arch-type and perfect specimen of the “bourgeois intellectual.”
Knowing or sensing this, Berezovsky tried to measure up to
specifications. From earliest childhood, he recounted, success meas-
ured in money and acquisitions was the ideal implanted in his
soul. That was the swamp in which were bred all his later crimes
against his country. The revolution had interrupted his steady
rise in the coal industry and was therefore his enemy. As a mat-
ter of course he sided with the mine owners against the insurgent
workers, with the Whites against the Reds, and finally with the
emigres against the Soviets.

It was not himself alone that Berezovsky was describing, but
an entire class; not his personal tragedy, but a revolutionary epoch
that swept a nation’s life from its moorings. Without effort this
engineer managed to depict what all great art strives to convey:
a great slice of humankind through the delineation of one charac-
ter, a whole period through the experiences of one victim.

Samoilov, Kazarinov, Matov, others, elaborated this picture.
They watched for Krylenko’s every hint in rounding out the de-
sign, accenting what needed reenforcement and binding the un-
willing prisoners more securely into the plot. They deserved their
reprieve. A few emphasized their proletarian or peasant origins
in a call upon the judges’ sympathy. If only they were allowed to
live, they promised to repay the revolution for its generosity
by working always and only for the common good. Such pleas
of a miraculous reform under G.P.U. auspices and the threat of
shooting drew smiles and laughter from the crowded audiences
in the stuffy Hall of Columns.

It was a new audience every session: deserving factory workers,
school children, out-of-town delegations, visiting peasant groups,
vouchsafed a peep at the spectacle. More than a hundred thousand,
it was estimated, in this way saw a tiny segment of the proceed-
ings. The luckier among them witnessed some episode of high
tragedy, some stirring passage-at-arms between a prisoner and his
accuser. The trial, of course, was not all melodrama. There were

DEMONSTRATION TRIAL

123

long arid stretches of technical bickerings, dull repetition, and
sensations which did not come off sensationally. Some days, in-
deed, the Soviet press did not find it easy to maintain the atmos-
phere of epic villainy unmasked and its reports sagged to anti-
climax. But for the spectators inside the courtroom, even the
dullest sessions were not without dramatic highlights.

The few who insisted upon their innocence — Imineetov, Kuzma,
Andrei Kolodoob, Eliadze and the rest — provided the biggest
thrills for spectators. To see them at bay, their backs arched, panic
in their voices, turning from a stinging question by the prosecutor
to ward off a statement by a fellow-prisoner, swinging around to
meet a judge’s admonition — spinning, flailing, stumbling over their
own words — finally standing still, exhausted and terror-stricken,
staring into the auditorium as though aware of spectators for the
first time, was indeed keen sport: lucky shock-brigadiers who drew
such a session!

Or one of the days in which prisoners tried to withdraw their
confessions. Perhaps they were frightened by the doom that crept
closer, or given new courage, after their prison isolation, by the
incredible sight of so many free people in one room. In any
case, they tried desperately to pull themselves free of their signed
statements and often tangled themselves more deeply in the ef-
fort, like insects caught on flypaper. There was Bebenko, for in-
stance. He had been arrested the previous summer and had there-
fore been in the hands of the G.P.U. without trial nearly a year.
He admitted having signed a “confession” but now wished to re-
nounce it as a pack of lies.

“I scarcely knew what I signed,” he said, while the audience
tensed with new interest, the prosecutor and defense attorneys
drew nearer. “I was driven to distraction by threats, threats, so
I signed. ... I tried to withdraw it before the trial, but . . .
but . . .”

He looked at Krylenko and could not finish his sentence. What-
ever the power that drove him to distraction, he was still under
its spell. He realized that his words were ominous, evoking visions
of G.P.U. torture chambers and third-degree horrors in the popu-
lar imagination. And these were the very things which Krylenko
must obliterate from the view of the foreign reporters at the foot

124 hallelujah!

of the rostrum. He looked at the prisoner at bay. His voice was
dangerously soft and concise.

“Do you want to say that you were intimidated, threatened?”
he asked.

Bebenko hesitated, dropped his eyes. He was defeated.

“No,” he whispered.

We who sat through the trial ten and twelve hours a day, who
had worked our emotions and vocabularies to the point of pros-
tration, needed spicier meat to stir our interest than the one-
session visitors. We waited for days such as the elderly Skorutto
or the Kolodoob brothers provided.

One evening Skorutto was reported too ill to attend. The next
morning, however, he was the first to be called. It was an ash-gray,
trembling figure which staggered to the mahogany pillar on which
the microphone was perched. There was that in his demeanor,
and in the alertness of Krylenko, which galvanized the courtroom
into expectancy. Even the businesslike cameramen and lighting
technicians were nervously attentive. And the atmosphere of im-
pending thrill was more than justified.

Skorutto was one of those who had denied any complicity in
the sabotage. In his examination he stuck valiantly by this denial,
in the face of pressure from half a dozen of the prisoners who
labored to implicate him. He had been abroad in connection with
some purchases in America when the round-up of Shakhty en-
gineers was begun. In Berlin he had read of the arrest of many
of those who worked close to him, and could expect nothing less
than his own arrest. Nevertheless, he had returned to his native
land and his Soviet job. Was it a token of clean conscience? Or
perhaps supreme gall? Or maybe, as the more romantic reporters
preferred to write, an expression of Slav “fatalism”? And now
this man, a shattered replica of the one who entered the court-
room at the opening, stood tremulously before the microphone
and informed the court that he had an important declaration to
make.

“Last night,” he said in effect, “I wrote out and signed a state-
ment confessing my own guilt, as well as the guilt of Rabinovich,
Imineetov and others. ...”

The words had barely registered on our minds when the court-
room was electrified by an unearthly shriek from the box where

DEMONSTRATION TRIAL 125

the relatives of the prisoners sat 3 the piercing notes wrenched from
the throat of a wounded animal. It was a woman’s voice.

“Kolya,” the woman cried, “Kolya darling, don’t lie! Don’t!
You know you’re innocent!”

The prisoner collapsed into a chair as though the cry had been
a hammer-blow on his head, weeping aloud, beating his breast,
and writhing in that utter agony without shame. A shudder passed
like a wind through the tight-packed auditorium. . . . Hurriedly
Vishinsky adjourned the session for ten minutes.

The audience, released, exploded into animated talk, out-shout-
ing one another. It is Skorutto’s wife, the news flashed through
the crowd. The prisoner was led away, still wailing his despair.

When the session was reopened and calm restored, he came once
more to the microphone.

“Yes, I wrote a confession last night. That was at nine o’clock.
But I could not go to sleep. For eight hours I struggled with my
conscience. At five in the morning I wrote another statement in
which I withdrew the first one. I could not betray my friends.
I am innocent.”

Krylenko was once more master of himself — cool, relentless, at
his most sarcastic. It was not the guilt of this one prisoner that
he must establish, but the name of the G.P.U. that he must pro-
tect. One dread thought hammered at everyone’s mind: what were
the pressures which had driven this Skorutto, while allegedly too
ill to attend the trial, to indite a confession only to withdraw it
eight tortured hours later?

Did anyone force him to confess, Krylenko wanted to know.
The inflection of his voice was ominous. Was he threatened?

Skorutto was like a man who had lost his mind. He wrung his
hands and wandered about the platform. No, nobody had forced
him, he finally said.

“These men had lied about me,” he tried to explain, “my own
friends and they lied about me! So I lied about them. ... It
has been agony! Can’t you understand? My God, can no one
understand? Eight nights I have not slept. I took drugs, but I
could not sleep, and finally I decided to confess. . . .”

He staggered from one corner of the rostrum to the other, like
one caged. Then he stopped at the microphone.

126 hallelujah!

“I never did these things of which they accuse me. Never!
Though I knew what waited for me. . . .”

The sentence remained unfinished. Again the shadow of the
unspoken things behind the curtains of the public trial. Again
Krylenko and the judge putting questions to erase that shadow.
Why had he confessed, Vishinsky pinioned the distracted Skorutto
with the spear-point of his anger.

“I had hoped that this court would be more lenient with me
if I pleaded guilty and accused the others,” Skorutto blurted out.

And if the day needed one more sensation to make it memorable,
a ghost stalked across the stage. Casually, in the course of some-
one’s interrogation, the name of Gavruchenko was mentioned.
And suddenly we became aware that Gavruchenko should have
been in the prisoners’ dock, but he had committed suicide before
the indictment was published. . . . Had he? How and why? The
questions remained unanswered. We knew only that a prisoner
was dead and that under the G.P.U. system of justice not even
his wife and his children would ever know precisely how it hap-
pened. They did not even see the body, there being jo habeas
cadaver , let alone habeas corf us, in revolutionary Russia. .

The following morning Skorutto once more stepped into the
limelight. He spoke in a monotone, like a dead man from the
grave. The confession was true, he now declared, and its retraction
a lie. It was the agonized cry of his wife which yesterday had
broken his determination to attest his guilt — and the guilt of those
whom he had implicated.

4

Another day’s audience, jammed into the columned hall for the
grab-bag of thrills, drew a Cain-and-Abel scene such as remains
eternally exciting to the sons of Adam. They watched Emilian
Kolodoob sweating and puffing as he labored to turn his own
brother, Andrei Kolodoob, into a traitor. Emilian had confessed
sabotage, while Andrei denied it. Now, with very little encourage-
ment from the prosecutor, Emilian looked unflinchingly at his
brother and insisted that they had both plotted, both received
emigre money, both lied to the Soviet state for which they worked.

Was I reading my own distaste into the quieter, tenser mood of
the spectators, or were they really embarrassed by this unnatural

DEMONSTRATION TRIAL 127

exhibition? The revolution and its chaotic aftermath had loosened
the bonds of family loyalties, yet even to Russians there must
have been something obscene in the performance. The obscenity
was raised to a pitch of horror when, immediately after being
betrayed by a brother, Andrei Kolodoob heard his own son de-
manding his death. A letter from the twelve- or thirteen-year-old
Kyril, published in that morning’s Pravda , was read into the
record.

I denounce my father as a whole-hearted traitor and an enemy of
the working class. I demand for him the severest penalty. I reject him
and the name he bears. Hereafter, I shall no longer call myself Kolo-
doob but Shakhtin.

In later years the Kremlin came to alter its view on family re-
lations. It was to preach once more the importance of blood ties
and the beauty of domestic loyalties. When I read the news in
New York, the memory of Kyril Kolodoob flashed through my
mind and how, all his life, he must carry the name Shakhtin like
the mark of Cain to remind him and all men of what he did to
his father. I thought of other sons in other Soviet exhibition trials
who had similarly urged death for their fathers, for this piece of
theater became a routine procedure in sabotage trials.

Engineer Bratanovsky, tall and well-groomed, provided us with
further opportunities to discuss Slav fatalism and Russian psychol-
ogy, and draw the stale analogies with Dostoievsky characters.
He, too, had been abroad when the arrests of Shakhty engineers
began. He had not the slightest doubt that he would be arrested,
yet he did not remain abroad. As though there was nothing re-
markable in walking open-eyed toward the certainty of imprison-
ment and shooting, Bratanovsky told of his return in the matter-
of-fact tone of a well-bred person at a dinner table.

One after another the puppets and the men stalked across the
red-draped stage, some cringing, others weeping, most of them
composed in the calm of ultimate despair. The last of the fifty-two
to tell his story was perhaps the most impressive and certainly the
one most eagerly awaited. We had become familiar with the sev-
enty-year-old Rabinovich in the weeks before his turn came. Again
and again he had been yanked into the recitals of other men. The
rest were small fry compared to this stocky, gray-haired, earnest

128 hallelujah!

old man. In 1920 Lenin himself had summoned Rabinovich and
invited his cooperation, as the foremost coal-mining engineer in
Russia. In the following seven years, until the day of his arrest,
he was virtual coal dictator. Often he had taken part in meetings
of the Council of People’s Commissars when technical questions
were on the agenda. His presence among the accused engineers was
the most fantastic touch of all.

During Kuzma’s interrogation, Rabinovich had risen in his seat
and asked to be heard. He stepped forward to defend the younger
man — the only defendant in the whole trial to come unasked to
another prisoner’s defense! There was a dignity and self-assurance
in his bearing, an authority in his voice, which set him apart from
the rest.

Rabinovich spoke now for over an hour, tracing his career from
its dimmest beginnings sixty years ago. Starting at the bottom, he
had attained first place in the coal industry before the revolution.
He had become rich. His personal interests were on the side of
the capitalists and, naturally, he could have no love for a revolu-
tion that took away his mines and banished his associates. But he
loved his work more than his wealth, and when Lenin honored
him with his confidence he was determined to merit that trust.
Others had talked about sleepless nights and harrowing thoughts
and nightmares.

“As for me,” Rabinovich said, “I sleep as soundly in prison as
in my own bed. I have a clear conscience and I have nothing to
fear.”

A man by the name of Mookin was brought into the courtroom
by G.P.U. guards, direct from a prison cell to testify against
Rabinovich. He was pallid, scared, bewildered by the lights and
people. Parrot-like he spoke a piece accusing Rabinovich of plot-
ting sabotage. Every so often his voice broke and he asked for a
drink of water. His hands trembled, so that the glass rattled on
his teeth. When he had finished his testimony, Rabinovich moved
forward so that the witness must look into his face.

“Is it me that you are talking about, or someone else? Look
at me and answer!”

Mookin staggered under the question and like a man blinded
groped once more for the water glass. Finally, he wrenched the
word from his gullet. “You,” he said.

DEMONSTRATION TRIAL 129

Stammering, drinking, fidgeting, he repeated his accusations
under Krylenko’s prompting and bulldozing. But as a state wit-
ness the man was doubly a failure. The trial’s impresario had
committed his greatest blunder in dragging this harried creature
from the gloom of his cell into the floodlights of public attention.
In the first place, Mookin was too clearly intimidated and an-
guished. In the second place, he stood as living proof that others
— God knows how many scores or hundreds — were in the custody
of the G.P.U. on similar charges, though they were not in the
prisoners’ dock. Krylenko had blundered. It was one thing to
know, as we all did, that only a handful had been winnowed for
public trial: only enough to give verisimilitude to the pattern of
an international plot and an organized gang of saboteurs. The rest
languished in prison or faced the firing squad without benefit of
publicity. It was quite another thing to see a specimen of those
who had not been chosen for demonstration purposes — and a piti-
ful, broken specimen at that. Another lightning flash disclosing a
little of the background which, more than the trial itself, held
men’s thoughts.

Krylenko’s closing address lasted six hours. He justified once
again his fame as an orator. How his eloquence swept uncertain
regiments into the ranks of the Soviets was part of the legendary of
the revolution in its earliest days. That eloquence now lashed the
fifty-two men and many of them cringed, as though his words
were physical blows. He stirred the auditorium into a frenzy of
hatred, so that they applauded wildly the demands for “the high-
est measure of social defense” — “ Rasstrel !” — “shooting.” The
word exploded in his speech over and over again like a pistol shot.
He asked death for twenty-two of the prisoners. Only when he
reached Rabinovich did he falter. It was painful to him to ask for
it, he said, knowing the old man’s past services, but — “ Rasstrel ! ”

The defense speeches were faint and tremulous and apologetic.
These lawyers selected for the dangerous task of pretending a
defense were in a most uncomfortable position. Men whose repu-
tations dated back to tsarist days and tsarist courts, they belonged
to the same social group as the men whom they ostensibly de-
fended and knew well enough that the blood thirst in the elo-
quence of Krylenko and the applause of the crowd included them
no less than the accused technicians. Meticulously they avoided

130 hallelujah!

any suggestion of doubt as to the genuineness of the confessions, or
anything which might reflect on the G.P.U. Each of them had
a specific group of prisoners as his special charges, and therefore
felt free to attack the rest of them as furiously as Krylenko him-
self. The total effect of their speeches, therefore, was to reinforce
the state’s case!

Then several so-called prosecutors for the people took the radio
“mike.” The formal fiction was that they represented the public
and, having sat through the entire trial, now gave their views.
Each of them added his quota of abuse and ended with an im-
passioned demand for death sentences. Among them, it happened,
was a large, bearded, impressive-looking man representing the
engineering societies. Several years later he was to appear on the
same platform in the same setting of lights and ballyhoo, but in
another role. He was himself arrested for economic sabotage.

The final ceremony, in accordance with ancient Russian usage,
was a “last word” by each of the prisoners. It turned into a
fantastic and incredible parade of naked passions. There were those
who begged for mercy and those who spoke words of defiance.
They cringed and snarled and begged and blundered. Fifty-two
men stampeded by the fear of death. Only a very few, among
them the two aged Jews, Rabinovich and Imineetov, retained their
self-respect intact. Imineetov said, “One day another Zola will
arise and will write another J y Accuse to restore our names to
honor.” A tall man, when his name was called, staggered to the
microphone and shouted, “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to
die!” Another walked forward calmly and in the most urbane
manner said, “I am guilty. I do not deny it. That is all.”

On the whole they made a sorry picture. Only by a violent
stretch of the imagination could one cast these groveling men in
heroic roles, either as martyrs or as great conspirators. Guilty or
innocent, they were men defeated, impotent, without a deep faith
or hope for the future to sustain them. Not one of them had
advanced any more exalted motive for spoiling machines or oppos-
ing the revolution than his own desire for more wealth. Not one
of them had even tried to raise his behavior to the level of a
social cause or the defense of a principle— any principle, the right
to private initiative, or democracy. . . .

In other Soviet trials of which I had read— of churchmen or

DEMONSTRATION TRIAL

131

Social Revolutionaries — some of the accused men and women had
held their heads high: they had plotted and connived for God,
for fatherland, for a new revolution. There was no trace of such
idealism to dignify the Shakhty trial, in which those who admit-
ted guilt were by their own description small, self-seeking, un-
inspired persons, filled with chagrin over their private losses and
never once thinking beyond their own bellies and purses. A few
among them showed that they possessed a certain human dignity.
But the group as a whole seemed to me a sad exhibition of what
the age-old system of private greed does to its most devoted
servants.

The verdict was announced for four in the afternoon, but the
public was not admitted until eight. An hour later the prisoners
filed in and took their seats. But the judges did not emerge until
midnight. Ancient custom required that the presiding judge write
out the verdict in his own handwriting and it was a lengthy docu-
ment. There was an ironic touch in such preservation of an in-
herited form of justice when so much of its substance had been
deliberately violated. The long waiting added to the tension.
Everyone remained standing (another inherited formality) while
Vishinsky, for a full hour, read the verdict.

Eleven were sentenced to death, six of them with recommend-
ations for reprieve in consideration of their helpfulness. Thirty-
eight other Russians were sentenced to prison terms ranging from
one to ten years. Rabinovich was given six years. One of the Ger-
mans was acquitted and the other two received suspended sen-
tences, which amounted to the same thing. The show was over,
except for a formal announcement three days later of five execu-
tions.

5

The next days were a sort of convalescence for me after the
fever and strain of the long trial. Even physically it had been ex-
hausting 5 besides reporting the proceedings in the former Nobles
Club, I had to keep abreast of all other news developments
throughout the Soviet Union. Far more exhausting, however, were
the currents of self-searching generated by the trial. I had pro-
ceeded on the assumption that the revolution can do no wrong,
since even its crimes are justified by its mystical mandate from

132 hallelujah!

History. Something in the weeks o£ trial, I could not place my
finger on it yet, challenged that mystical assumption. Whatever
the infinite purposes of History, whatever the compulsions upon
its finite human instruments, did it relieve them and me of all
responsibility?

Turning my impressions over and over in my mind, discarding
the ranting of politicians and sifting, as best I could, the palpable
lies from what rang true, I felt certain of only these things:.

First, that most, if not all, of the accused men were guilty
either of actual sabotage against the Soviet regime, or of such utter
apathy toward their work that the results amounted to. sabotage.
Men of their sort were, at best, prisoners of the revolution, obey-
ing its orders and dreaming of escape.

Second, that the melodramatic international plot projected by
the Soviet rulers to impress their people and the outside world
was largely a figment of their own stagecraft.

Third, that behind the trial was a story of mass arrests, forced
confessions, unprincipled and inhuman third-degree methods that
broke the body and the spirit of its victims. I sensed horrors
touched by sadism, though I could not prove it and tried hard to
wipe my mind clean of their shadows.

Fourth, that the trial was in a peculiar way a form of exhibition-
ism: a group intoxicated by untrammeled power showed off its
new strength. It renounced the hamperments of principles and
decencies and respect for human life to give its fresh energies the
widest play.

I do not say that these were the facts. I record only that those
were my inner conclusions — conclusions some of which I buried
far out of sight, because they would have inhibited me in serving
the revolution.

I shouted down similar conclusions when they were voiced by
Russian or non-Russian acquaintances. In the courtroom, watching
the spectacle and reading closely the newspaper accounts, I came
to believe that the whole Soviet population was accepting without
serious question the official version of the trial. But outside, in
day-to-day contact with Russians of all types, that belief was
quickly shattered. I discovered that the government’s victory was
far from complete. In a guarded phrase or a politically off-color
joke or in tense silences, people betrayed their doubts and cyni-

DEMONSTRATION TRIAL I 33

cisms. Whatever they might say aloud, few in their hearts doubted
that the confessions had been extorted by threats or actual tor-
ture, and that the sabotage and apathy of the technicians had been
blown up to the size of an international plot for obvious political
reasons.

The fact that production troubles kept increasing despite the
“liquidation” of such conspiracies fed the cynicism. In the very
heart of the Shakhty coal area output declined in the next months
and accidents increased — as was only natural with the technical
directors either arrested or paralyzed by fear.

The effect upon the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, upon whom,
however little they relished it, the Bolsheviks had to depend for
technical leadership in old and new industries, was disastrous.
While the Shakhty exhibition may have led some to desist from
overt acts, it drove all the rest to the most costly and overt of
all acts — inactivity. They avoided responsibility as though it were
a plague. Why undertake anything if failure might be construed
as sabotage? They had seen men treated as traitors because the
mines they had mechanized at great cost proved unprofitable. They
had seen others accused of issuing sabotage “instructions” in telling
technicians that turbines would be spoiled if handled in a par-
ticular way. The only safety was in doing nothing, in “passing
the buck” of important decisions to someone else.

During the greater part of the Five Year Plan period the
strength of the technical intelligentsia was crippled. It worked in
fear and trepidation, aware that it was a pariah class, distrusted,
easy game for petty tyrants, and convenient scapegoats for the
mistakes and ignorance and mismanagement of others. The
Shakhty trial and the persecution of the intelligentsia which it
initiated and symbolized seemed to me, with every passing year,
as much a blunder as a tragedy. For me, as for others, it remained
a glaring proof of the dangers of immense unrestrained power
with its inevitable temptation to use unstinting force where force
was least effective.

VII. Journey Through Russia

IN THE summer there is traditionally a wholesale exodus from
the cities to the country in Russia. Long before the advent of Mos-
cow’s brief and dusty summer, people talked of nothing but dachas
(country houses). When the snows were still on the ground, more
prudent Muscovites traveled into the villages nearby and rented
rooms or cottages from the peasants. By June, wagons loaded with
household goods began to rumble towards the country districts.
Peasant householders in pleasant locations earned more by renting
to summer tenants than they did by plowing the soil. They moved
to shanties or crowded their families into a windowless garret to
make room for the profitable visitors.

For anyone accustomed to summers in New York, the season
should hold no terrors even on the equator. The Russian summer,
we were to discover in time, was merciful by comparison. The
general and frenzied preparations for the annual evacuation, how-
ever, alarmed us into a frantic search for a dacha . Billy explored
the suburbs, returning with sad tales of failure. Befouled, ill-
smelling cottages shared by the peasants and their cattle could be
rented only for sums beyond our bank account — probably the prices
were stepped up as a subtle compliment to the supposed affluence
of all foreigners. Livable quarters had already been preempted
by bureaucrats, embezzlers, G.P.U. officials, and others who could
stand the tariff. In the end, Billy and Genie joined the families
of two Foreign Office employees who were going to the Baltic
seashore near Riga for the summer, while I faced the terrors of
the summer alone.

It turned out far from terrible. The annual exodus, in fact,
proved as much a social convention as a necessity. I visited at the
dachas of Russian and foreign friends, learned to play gorodki
(a Russian variant of skittles), and bathed nude in the Moscow
River beyond the city limits and in the lakes and brooks where
the summer colonies were clustered. I discovered the charms of

134

JOURNEY THROUGH RUSSIA 135

the countryside of the region: forests of slender silver birch or
darkling pine, rolling meadows of tenderest green, and sudden
brooks where men and women bathed and soaped themselves with
only an imaginary boundary line between them. I picked huckle-
berries and blackberries in woods carpeted with pine needles, woods
as dim and hushed as Gothic cathedrals.

To the peasants whom I met, a foreigner was a minor miracle
and an object of endless curiosity. They plied me with questions
about American peasants and American skyscrapers — in part, I
am sure, for the sly fun of hearing my stumbling Russian. My
shoes, my trousers, my horn-rimmed glasses, everything foreign
set them clucking with admiration. Even to peasants on the pe-
riphery of Russia’s metropolis, the outside world was a fairyland
on the other side of the moon.

Whether in town or country, the summer nights were magical
interludes of only two or three hours at most between the late
sunset and the early sunrise. Coming out of a party at a hotel or
a home at one or two in the morning, I would find the deserted
city silhouetted delicately against a violet dawn in the east, while
the western sky was still a bluish gray studded with expiring stars.
The violet turned to rose as I took the longest route home and
watched the sun’s first rays edging pastel-colored church cupolas
with gold. These early dawns in Moscow have for me a quality
of enchantment that, in retrospect, seems a dream half-remem-
bered. Perhaps it was the contrast with the noisy, crowded day
filled with problems and slogans that made these intervals so
fancifully precious. Moscow seemed a place bewitched, its every-
day life suspended as the tints of morning filtered through the
sieve of night.

In the matter of news, too, that summer provided a lull — the
calm, had we known it, before the storm that was to break before
long and uproot millions of families and plunge the country into
a panic of ruthless speed. The Kremlin’s fervid promises to desist
from further violence against the peasantry had brought a new
spurt of energy to farming and the press reports of crop progress
were for the most part optimistic. All important officials were
vacationing on the fringes of the Black Sea or spending most of
their time at their dachas ; a number of the finest old estates and
the most attractive summering sites were reserved for G.P.U.

136 hallelujah!

leaders and the more privileged communists. The lull enabled me
to enjoy the country and occasional excursions to more distant spots
celebrated for their palaces, ancient churches or scenery.

I flew to Riga for a few days to visit my family and found
them and their Moscow companions thoroughly disillusioned with
the “Baltic riviera” of which Russians speak so glowingly. The
clear warm days were so rare that one could easily keep count of
them. And the bathing was regulated with a prudishness that
seemed fantastic to the more natural Russians. Riga itself, almost
Dutch in its freshly-swept look, its shops running over with food
delicacies the memory of which had begun to fade in my mind,
was a healing respite from the intensity of Moscow. We took in
an American movie, the captions of which were flashed in three
languages — Latvian, German and Russian — and shopped for the
sheer thrill of shopping. Like Russians themselves when they con-
front capitalist abundance for the first time, we simply wallowed
in the plenitude. Six unbroken months in the Soviet Union with
its new standards are enough to make the old bourgeois world
incredible. Foreigners deeply immersed in the new Russian life
must rediscover capitalist civilization when they emerge.

2

The one piece of sensational news centered in Moscow that
summer of 1928 was in itself a comforting vacation from the
Shakhty trial, food queues, chastisement of heretical communists,
peasant terror and other news staples of the preceding months.
I refer to the ice-breaker Krassirfs rescue, in July, of survivors
of an Italian dirigible expedition to the North Pole. Though the
melodramatic events occurred in the extreme North, the in-
formation reached the world in large measure through Moscow,
which made it our story. And how we gloried in it! A towering
human-interest yarn at last, in which we could let ourselves go
without fear of offending sensitive officials or drawing down Bol-
shevik lightning on our heads!

Literal Marxists think bougeois reporters in the U.S.S.R. lie
in wait with mouths dripping saliva for Soviet horrors and disas-
ters to pounce upon. They would be cured of this dismal vision
had they seen the eager relish with which we pounced on the

JOURNEY THROUGH RUSSIA 137

heroic exploits of the ice-breaker Krassin, its crew and its aviators.
Out of the grudging formal communiques we fashioned a saga of
Soviet daring which will forever embellish the records of Arctic
exploration. We did this despite the bureaucratic attitude of a
censorship apparatus so rigidly geared for suppression of facts that
it automatically hampered the transmission of a story more favor-
able to its reputation among the peoples of the globe than any-
thing that had happened in years. The actual events were suffi-
ciently stirring, but the correspondents — in a sort of holiday of
the spirit after the oppressive Shakhty proceedings — spread wide
the wings of their fancy in blowing up Samoilovich, Chukhnovsky,
and the other heroes to almost mythological dimensions. The ice-
breaker itself, blunt-nosed, powerful, imperturbable, turned under
our typewriter keys into a symbol of Soviet strength rescuing the
world.

That those to whom the Red Samaritans brought succor were
Black Fascists enhanced that symbolism. The irony of Soviet Russia
bringing life to stranded Italians and putting Mussolini’s realm
in their debt was not lost on the world. For nearly six weeks the
whole world had watched in fascinated horror the desperate and
seemingly hopeless attempts to find survivors of the dirigible Italia
somewhere on the floating ice masses off North East Land. It saw
one rescue party after another wrecked or returning empty-handed.
One of these parties, led by Roald Amundsen, never returned
and the details of its fate remain a mystery to this day. Meanwhile
Soviet ice-breakers carrying seaplanes and several of the country’s
ace fliers were slowly nosing their way through the ice floes to-
ward the scene of the tragedy. Their laborious climb northward
was scarcely noticed. But as they neared the scene, the civilized
world became abruptly aware of their persistent struggle and
watched excitedly as the Krassin and the Malygin elbowed their
way through crashing ice masses.

On July ii, Boris Chukhnovsky flew from the Krassin and
reported by radio that he had located three men on an ice-floe,
two of them standing up and waving frantically to him, the third
apparently lying down. He had circled over them as signal that
they were seen. In attempting to get back to his base he made a
forced landing. Apparently he urged the ship to go pick up the
castaways before bothering about him.

138 hallelujah!

“Never mind me, save the others!” we reported him as saying,
and the phrase became famous— a theme made to order for edi-
torials and sermons. Blushingly I record that the phrase was in-
vented in the little room near the censor’s office where we worked.
But if he didn’t say it, he easily might have— and, no doubt, said
words no less stirring.

Thirty-six hours later the Krassin reached the stranded group;
there were only two instead of the three Chukhnovsky thought
he had seen. The same day the ice-breaker also picked up five
other survivors, while the press in all countries cheered itself
hoarse. It was seeing those sinister Bolsheviks in a brand-new role.

The scanty details of the exploit were reported by the ship’s
officials and several Russian newspapermen on board directly to
Moscow. We were driven to the raw edge of apoplexy by the
battle to wrest this information from its official keepers — all of it
was treated as a state secret, when elementary good sense should
have led the government to help us smear the yarn as thick as
strawberry jam on bread.

Chukhnovsky’s report of sighting three men stirred up un-
savory and slightly macabre controversy. It had been instantly
assumed that the three were Captain Filippo Zappi, the dirigible’s
navigator, Captain Alberto Mariano, pilot, and the young Swedish
meteorologist, Dr. Finn Malmgren, who had started off together
after the crash on the chance of bringing aid. The Krassin found
only Zappi and Mariano. They explained that Dr. Malmgren had
died a month ago, and that what Chukhnovsky mistook for a
third figure was a shadow or a roll of blankets. But there were
those, especially in Dr. Malmgren’s native land, who refused to
believe their story, charging that the Italians had abandoned the
young Swede and taken his clothes and supplies. There were even
gruesome hints of cannibalism and some writers made much of
the report that the Italians were wearing some of Dr. Malmgren’s
clothes. Ultimately, experts came to believe the two survivors’
account. But while the mystery lasted it gave Moscow, where
every grain of information was fought over, something to chew on.

In the general anxiety to do the story up brown, the Associated
Press correspondent pulled a “boner” which embarrassed that
great agency for some time. The communique reporting that

JOURNEY THROUGH RUSSIA 139

Mariano and Zappi were taken aboard the ice-breaker and that
Dr. Malmgren was dead was so crudely worded that we all be-
lieved Dr. Malmgren’s body, too, had been retrieved. My col-
league thereupon wrote a colorful and most sentimental account
of the scientist’s “funeral.” He had touching speeches, weather-
beaten old Russian tars weeping over the corpse, bowed heads and
the rest of the effects appropriate to such an occasion. The imagi-
nary funeral, worse luck, carried the date-line, “On Board the
Krassin/* instead of Moscow, to give it an authentic eye-witness
flavor. The lugubrious tale was published in the United States
and I was duly reprimanded for my failure to “cover” the funeral
before it became known that Dr. Malmgren’s body had been
neither recovered nor wept over.

The Arctic drama had been spread in the Soviet newspapers as
in the rest of the world, and a wave of national pride rolled over
the population. Books, articles, lectures, and motion pictures con-
verted the tale of individual courage and skill into another proof
of triumphant socialism. Chukhnovsky’s expert flying, Professor
Samoilovich’s knowledge of polar conditions, the captain’s fine
seamanship seemed convincing, if illogical, testimony of the right-
ness of Marx and his victorious disciple, Stalin.

National patriotism in the Western sense is something rela-
tively new to Russia. Before the revolution it was propagated
largely by the new intelligentsia, and even with them it was
mystically racial more than nationalistic. Patriotism presupposes
an awareness of the surrounding world in which one’s nation is a
distinct unit — an awareness of boundaries. Primitive peoples re-
serve their patriotic sentiments for their immediate village or
region, everything else being an infinite and mysterious cloud.
To a peasant in Kostroma or Viatka, Russia was too vague and
limitless a concept to stir a profound loyalty. It has been one of
the curious functions of the revolution, in ironical disregard of
its internationalist dogmas, to stir national consciousness in Russia.
The mere emphasis on the hostile capitalist encirclement has
tended to mark off the frontiers of their country in the minds of
millions. The dramatization of heroic episodes like the Krassin
story, sensational air flights or industrial achievements has fed the
nascent patriotism.

140 hallelujah!

3

I made my first long journey through Russia in the early
autumn, visiting Kiev, Odessa, the Crimea and the Caucasus,
Rostov, and other sections. I visited these places many times in
subsequent years and it is not easy to disentangle my first im-
pressions from the cumulative memory. I kept no notebook (a
stupidity for which I cannot forgive myself), and my articles on
the trip, like nearly everything I wrote in this period, are far
from a literal record of my reactions. Deliberately and with a
clear conscience I wrote for effect. My duty as I saw it was to
strengthen the faith of the world’s workers in the first socialist
land, and I did not permit myself knowingly to cast doubt on the
perfection of the Soviet scenery, let alone its economic system and
leadership.

I brought back from the tour a heavy heart; the routine
miseries of the period were more apparent in the provinces than
in the capital. But I wrote pieces which could, with only slight
emendations, have been published in one of the Soviet propaganda
magazines in America. Having mentioned that I had met “per-
sons of the most diverse temperaments and social interests,” I
added:

Almost without exception these people reflected a warm conviction
that just ahead of them lies a bright future, for their cities, for their
country as a whole. They talked with enthusiasm of the new factories,
the new power stations, the rows of bright new workers’ homes, the
grain elevators that were going up in places where they live and work.
They talked of these things, moreover, as though they were personal
possessions.

I met, indeed, people who talked in the strain of a Pravda edi-
torial, especially officials whom I cornered and plied with ques-
tions. But they were the exception. Casual acquaintances made on
trains, in hotels and restaurants, were more likely to complain
about food shortage, overbearing bureaucrats, and other troubles.
My American clothes, a glimpse of my wrist-watch or fountain
pen or razor blades, were enough to pluck complaints about hard-
ships and the barrenness of their lives from envious Russians. I
found myself repeatedly trying to convince them that their fate

JOURNEY THROUGH RUSSIA 141

was not as bleak as it seemed. The gew-gaws o£ capitalist pro-
duction, I assured them, were small compensation for a system
of bourgeois exploitation and slavery.

Leaving Moscow, I shared the bare wooden shelf in the “hard”
or third-class carriage with a tall, clean-cut fellow in a semi-mili-
tary overcoat and good boots. He might easily have posed for the
portrait of a Stalwart Workingman. In removing overcoat and
jacket and making himself comfortable for the long journey to
his home, Odessa, he left his revolver in full view. The dumb-
show was intended too obviously to impress everyone and the for-
eigner in particular with the fact that he was “somebody.” Then
he became a little ashamed of this childish show-off. He put away
the revolver and blushed like a schoolboy. He transferred his
boastfulness from a personal to a national level, and for an hour
or two enlarged on the achievements and “perspectives” of the
Soviet regime and the genius of Stalin.

But gradually it dawned on him that this emissary from the
capitalist world was already sufficiently convinced. Abruptly he
changed his tune and long before we reached Kiev we had ex-
changed roles. I was reduced to convincing him that things were
not nearly as bad as he thought and the difficulties which distressed
him only temporary sacrifices on the road to socialism.

“Ekh, brother,” he interjected ever so often, “it is easy for you
to speak. You have an American passport and can thumb your
nose at us if you like and go back to America. You would talk
differently if you were caught here like the Russians.”

I felt that his complaints were no deeper than his boasts \ he
was caught and confused between his theoretical convictions and
his practical discomforts. We parted at Kiev. A week later I
looked him up at his home in Odessa and he showed me through
the city, again vacillating between pride in the future and disgust
with the present. Only when he pointed out the sites of civil war
battles and recounted the terrible but romantic events of those
stirring days, with particular reference to his own role, did he
achieve unequivocal enthusiasm.

My traveling companion was an American I.W.W. of Russian
extraction who had returned to his native land after the revolu-
tion, by name Belinkes. Awkward, kind-hearted but not overly in-

142 hallelujah!

telligent, he did yeoman service as interpreter when my pidgin
Russian failed me, and worked veritable miracles in obtaining
tickets at railroad stations where others had been waiting days and
weeks for accommodations. Unfortunately, he considered it his
patriotic function to act as guide and political mentor, tasks for
which he was peculiarly unfitted. Somewhere, perhaps in the
American movies, he had developed a fixed idea that the prin-
cipal object of travel was to see monuments and could never quite
grasp why I preferred to see people, cafes, theaters, smelly side-
streets. All of these, he felt, no doubt, were amply available in
Moscow and therefore did not justify the cost of travel.

We traveled “hard,” sleeping on the bare worn shelves when
we were lucky enough to stretch out at all. The idea was to get
closer to the Russian people. It was a sacrifice on the altar of
professional duty which I did not willingly make again. Open
windows are, as everyone in Russia knows, unhealthy 3 besides,
they encourage the “wild boys” who still infested the stations to
reach in and help themselves to everything that can be grabbed
by ingenious and well-trained little thieves. Spitting and more
distressing types of bodily relief were unrestrained. (“City folks
are strange people,” a peasant once told me, “they carry their
sputum in little pieces of cloth, instead of spitting it out on the
ground like decent folk.”) A crowded, air-tight carriage, after
its inmates have drawn off their boots and made themselves at
home, is scarcely a sweet-smelling place.

The warm friendliness of fellow-passengers, however, was some
compensation for the discomforts. Most of them felt it their duty
to assist a foreigner. They brought me hot water at stations and
were always ready to share their bread and sausage. Or they
guarded my belongings while I stepped out for air and to buy
food 5 the station lunch-counters at this stage were still fairly
well stocked, and at most stations local peasants sold food at steep
prices. At night we put our coats and shoes under our heads both
as cushions and by way of guarding against theft, and we tied the
baggage to our wrists or ankles with ropes so that we would be
wakened if anyone made a foray.

I found the cities without exception shabby. “The new Russia,”
I wrote to console myself and reassure my readers, “is busy with
innumerable more pressing affairs, and its towns will remain sadly

JOURNEY THROUGH RUSSIA 143

out of repair for a few years longer. To the stranger the first
impression is still an unpleasant one. It takes a lively imagination,
and a background of appreciation of what the country has been
through, to overcome it.” My imagination was not always equal
to the task, though not for lack of trying. The beauty was there.
Looked at through half-closed eyes, or in the kindly dusk of sun-
down, it could be discerned — in a thousand fine old buildings, in
sweeping panoramas, in breath-taking skylines. But it was a
beauty hidden for the time being under layers of dirt, rust, dis-
coloration.

Kiev, sprawled on hillsides, with the Dnieper threading through
it, had a magical quality when seen in perspective. At close range
this quality evaporated: streets, old churches, magnificent palaces
looked dilapidated and forlorn. Sebastopol, approached from the
Black Sea, was a truly beautiful sight: a steep hillside thickly sown
with white houses that splintered the sunshine. It has the character
of some of the Italian hill towns. But once in the town, climbing
its old stairways, I was more conscious of neglect than of beauty.
Even Yalta, once the show-place of Crimea, I found down-at-the-
heel and no match for its fabulous reputation. Shop windows in
all the cities were desolate holes, where rags and tag-ends of goods
seemed to have been thrown in at random. In the larger cities the
hotels were tolerable, and their food not too bad, but even in
Odessa and Rostov we fought a losing battle with vermin.

Psychologically, the atmosphere mellowed the farther south
we penetrated. In Moscow, the austerities of the communist faith
seemed to throw a shadow over the city, but the gloom lifted
gradually until it almost faded out in the Caucasus. In Batum,
people sat at little tables on the sidewalks or on the cobbled streets
outside of cafes, indulging in Turkish coffee, conversation, and
backgammon. In Tiflis, we visited several of the numberless duk-
hans, little restaurants, where every client is a connoisseur of wines
and food. In the best of them there were splendid displays of
appetizing fish and meats in endless variations. The Caucasians
wear daggers embellished in silver and semi-precious stones even
over their most ragged clothes, which is proof enough that they
take life with grand gestures.

In most of the cities south of Moscow there was a general
exodus of people from their homes after sundown, a heightening

I 44 HALLELUJAH !

of the romantic temper. There is no street in Moscow to match
the Ulitsa Vorovskovo in Kiev or Ulitsa Lasalya and Feldmann
Boulevard in Odessa for movement and humming life in the eve-
nings. The Feldmann (formerly Nikolayevsky) Boulevard, on the
steep ledge of land overlooking the Odessa harbor, presents a
scene at night without parallel in Russia. It is thronged with
people, young and old, by twos and threes and entire families,
strolling endlessly in the subdued light. The crackle of sunflower
seeds is in the air, and a web of flirtations lies over the promenad-
ers like a tangible and mildly stimulating presence.

Though new friends in the city complained that it was melan-
choly compared to its old self, Odessa was by all odds the pleas-
antest spot I had as yet found within the Soviet frontiers. Its large
cafes still had the warmth one associates with Vienna cafes. Before
the war it considered itself the Paris of the Black Sea. It even
had bad men to match the Paris af aches. Many of them, I was
told, used their courage and their proficiency with weapons to
more useful purposes in the civil war in punishing pogroms and
repulsing invaders. The legend of Mishka Yaponyets, a Jewish
gangster whom the revolution turned into a hero, was still fresh
in the city. His exploits have been celebrated by the gifted Soviet
writer, Babel, and others. Mishka organized and led Red volun-
teers, many of them drawn from the criminal elements, to defend
Jews against massacres by the Whites, and he died fighting the
White foe.

Along the waterfront, at the foot of the ledge on which the
city is propped, were the haunts of the bad men and their thorny
lady loves, as wicked and colorful as the dives of Marseilles.
Some of these haunts still exist, but an industrious excursion con-
vinced me that the color has run out of them.

I received a flaming reception when I returned to Moscow.
Literally. As I stepped into the backyard I saw flame and smoke
pouring from the door and windows of my apartment. Our ser-
vant girl lay stretched on the ground, bleeding, while neighbors
shouted and wrung their hands in helpless excitement. There was
no sign of my family. I rushed into the house and plunged flailing
through the thick smoke, calling the names of Billy and Genie.
Then I realized that the flames were confined to the kitchen and

JOURNEY THROUGH RUSSIA 145

the rest of the house was filled with smoke, but otherwise un-
touched. A defective kerosene stove had started the fire almost
at the moment of my arrival and was extinguished in a few min-
utes. The servant had dived through the closed kitchen window,
though the door was wide open. Her lacerated arms and my
singed eyebrows were the only casualties. Billy and Genie had
gone to meet my train and missed me, and the fire was over
when they reached home.

Fifteen minutes behind them came the firemen, bustling and
self-important. Despite the evidences of a bona fide fire, they were
offended that we had sent a “false alarm” and threatened to fine
me for having put out the fire without benefit of their nice new
hatchets and fire-hose. I promised, however, that next time I
would not be so rash, but would keep the fire going for them,
and everything was forgiven.

The journey through the hinterland gave me a new appre-
ciation for Moscow. If the city had seemed to me, coming from
the West, bleak and impoverished, it impressed me as a veritable
metropolis after Kiev, Novorossiisk, Batum and the thousand
towns and villages which I had glimpsed in passing. The shops
now seemed opulent and the people well dressed. Above all, the
vital cultural life of theater, music, radio and newspapers, and the
sense of proximity to the political dynamos of the land, made
Moscow wonderfully full and alive. I could understand how a
native of Kazan or Minsk — even of Rostov or Odessa — might feel
himself transported to a wonderland of civilization on confronting
Moscow for the first time.

It was a pity, almost, to destroy this illusion by a vacation in
Berlin. At the Adlon Bar on Unter-den-Linden I met correspon-
dents stationed in Germany or passing through on their way to
assignments. They had been nearly everywhere and seen nearly
everything. Yet Russia was a magnetic land of mystery even to
them. They questioned me eagerly about the Shakhty trial, peasant
disorders, food queues, the new political lines, and particularly
about the redoubtable, inaccessible and rather ominous Stalin.

More than the filing of stories and the sight of my “by-line” in
newspapers, this fraternization with well-known international re-
porters made me feel authentically a correspondent. I liked the
shop-talk that embraced the whole globe, the offhand way in

146 hallelujah!

which great names and great events were tossed into the conver-
sation. Outwardly, the talk was casual and touched with languor —
cynical boredom is a convention of the trade. But under it these
men and women who were the eyes and the ears of America in
the outside world were conscious of their privileged vantage point
and moved by a keen interest — sometimes no more than a sporting
interest, it is true, though none the less real — in the revolutions
and counter-revolutions and political jockeying of pre-depression
Europe.

VIII. Iron Monolith

THE period of the Five Year Plan has been christened Russia’s
“Iron Age” by the best-informed and least sensational of my
American colleagues in Moscow, William Henry Chamberlin. I
can think of no more apt description. Iron symbolizes industrial
construction and mechanization. Iron symbolizes no less the ruth-
lessness of the process, the bayonets, prison bars, rigid discipline
and unstinting force, the unyielding and unfeeling determination
of those who directed the period. Russia was transformed into a
crucible in which men and metals were melted down and reshaped
in a cruel heat, with small regard for the human slag.

It was a period that unrolled tumultuously, in a tempest of
brutality. The Five Year Plan was publicized inside and outside
Russia as no other economic project in modern history. Which
makes it the more extraordinary that its birth was unknown and
unnoticed.

The Plan sneaked up on the world so silently that its advent
was not discovered for some months. On the momentous October
first of 1928, the initial day of the Five Year Plan, we read the
papers, fretted over the lack of news and played bridge or poker
as though nothing exceptional was occurring. It was the begin-
ning of a new fiscal year, precisely like the October firsts pre-
ceding it. The “control figures” or plan for the ensuing twelve
months were rather more ambitious, with new emphasis on sociali-
zation of farming through state-owned “grain factories” and vol-
untary collectives of small holdings. But they were not sufficiently
different from other years to arrest the attention of competent
observers.

The fact is that the Kremlin itself was far from certain that a
new era had been launched. It had not yet charted a course. Or
rather, it had charted alternative courses and hesitated in which
direction to move. Not until Stalin and his closest associates see
fit to reveal what happened in the crucial months of that autumn

i47

1 48 HALLELUJAH !

will we know how close the Soviet regime came to choosing a
course which would have altered the whole history of Russia and
therefore of the present world.

There was nothing in the figures for the fiscal year of 1929 that
committed the ruling Party to a Five Year Plan of the scope
eventually announced. But a feeling of tense expectancy now
stretched the country’s nerves taut. A sharp turn of the wheel to
one side or the other was inevitable, and the population squared
for the shock. Economic difficulties were piling up dangerously
and the Kremlin could not steer a middle course much longer.
Food lines were growing longer and more restive. The pro-
ducers of food had tested their strength and tasted a measure of
victory; they rebelled more boldly against feeding the urban
population and the armies for rubles which could buy nothing.
Millions of grumbling mouths had to be either filled with food
or shut by force.

A partial crop failure in southern Russia aggravated the situ-
ation. Grain collections were not going well and, as always hap-
pened under these circumstances, the collectors began to resort to
strong-arm tactics. Arson and assassination flared up once more in
the villages, and Red troops were said to be “pacifying” the most
unruly districts with lead. Schools, clubs, government buildings,
and other institutions typifying the Soviet power were burned
down in dozens of places. The published details of the peasant
revenge were sufficiently harrowing, and what the press reported,
we all assumed, was no more than a fraction of the picture. Death
penalties, with and without trials, were the government’s auto-
matic answer. But they did not suffice. Something decisive had to
be done that would either placate the peasants or end their in-
subordination.

For a while the hope of drawing in foreign capital postponed
a decision. If enough goods could be produced to meet the food
growers’ demand for a fair return on their labor, the problem
would be more than half solved, A decree invited the capitalists
of the world to come in and develop Russia’s resources practically
on capitalist terms.

Had the outside world, especially the United States before
whose eyes the temptation was dangled most frankly, accepted the
offer, there would perhaps have been no Five Year Plan, no liqui-
dation of kulaks, no “Iron Age.” The Great Depression might,

IRON MONOLITH

149

indeed, have been less acute had world capital found a profitable
outlet in the development of Russia’s natural resources. But the
bourgeois world still regarded Russia as an “economic vacuum.”
The phrase is Herbert Hoover’s, whose knack for finding the
right word for the wrong idea amounted to genius.

In the light of future developments, it is curious to remember
that Hoover’s election to the Presidency in November created a
considerable flurry of optimism in Moscow. The Russians knew
his hatred of Reds and had at various times excoriated his alleged
role in overthrowing Bela Kun’s Soviet government in Hungary.
But Moscow had a fixation on engineering; the engineer is to
the communist faith what the prophet has been to older faiths.
With all his faults, Hoover was in Bolshevik eyes an engineer.
How, then, could his judgment of economic possibilities be warped
by personal feelings? “Hoover is a realist,” was the burden of
Soviet comment, “he must see that his country stands to gain by
encouraging trade and investments here.” The optimism, of course,
was short-lived.

The failure of the capitalist world to accept the invitation deter-
mined, as much as any other single consideration, the turning of
the wheel to the Left.

Reports of serious disagreement among the Kremlin leaders as
to the next step echoed through Moscow. Stalin formally denied
that there was any dissension or “petit bourgeois heresy” in the
Politburo — which was accepted as proof that the reports were well-
founded. Kalinin, generally regarded as spokesman for the peas-
ants, was said to favor placating them. Klementi Voroshilov, War
Commissar, whose Red Army was preponderantly a peasant army,
likewise counseled moderation on the agrarian front. Nikolai Buk-
harin, editor of Pravda and foremost theoretician in Stalin’s en-
tourage, had published an article decrying undue pressure on the
villages as “feudal exploitation” of the peasantry.

While counsel of moderation of this type was tolerated, and
the path to such policy left wide open, the drift to the Left was
not halted. Private traders and artisans employing labor — the ur-
ban kulaks — continued to be “liquidated” without let-up. “Specu-
lators,” which is Soviet for private merchants, were arrested by
the hundred and the thousand, their property confiscated and
themselves banished.

1 50 HALLELUJAH !

The final decision was Stalin’s. Whether he had hesitated in
deference to the prevailing Right sentiment or because of his own
doubts will probably never be known. The Stalin legend is one
that cannot countenance the admission of even a temporary un-
certainty. His choice showed an amazing daring and an aware-
ness of absolute power. The moment may well be accepted as
marking the final emergence of Stalin, the Party secretary, as
Stalin, the dictator. He had bided his time with Asiatic patience.
An inconspicuous commissar and Party functionary under Lenin,
then an eq ual member of a triumvirate with Zinoviev and Kame-
nev, now indisputably the uncrowned monarch.

No doubt he derived intellectual self-confidence in his choice
from the humbled but still Leftist supporters of Trotsky who, one
after another, had crawled back on bleeding knees, ready to serve
him. Stalin was more at ease maneuvering men than maneuvering
ideas. Chastened Trotskyists like Piatakov,* Radek, and Preo-
brazhensky were invaluable intellectual reinforcements. Stalin’s
espousal of policies close to Trotsky’s provided the returned Trot-
skyists with a perfect justification for seeming betrayal of their
whilom leader. It took the sting from humiliation and spread balm
on a sore conscience.

But while this accession of brains may have given a fillip to
Stalin’s assurance, it does not detract from the audacity. His de-
cision ran counter to the sentiment not alone of the population,
but of the rank and file of the Communist Party. Supporters of
Trotsky like to believe that “pressure by the masses” forced Stalin
to throw his Right allies overboard and steer reluctantly to the
Left. Doubtless there was a portion of the more revolutionary
workers, especially among the younger people, bitterly opposed to
any compromise with the “bourgeois elements” in the country.
But the pressures, it was evident to anyone in Moscow at the time,
were overwhelmingly in the other direction.

2

The defeat of Trotsky was complicated by personal antagonisms,
theoretical disputes, and a struggle for sheer power. In essence,
however, it was a repudiation of Leftism. The Russian people,

* Executed in January, 1937.

IRON MONOLITH

151

including the communists, were in a mood for truce. The failure
of revolutionary efforts in Germany, Hungary, and China had
bankrupted the hope for world revolution and foreign allies. Mil-
lionfold classes, not the least of them being the vast bureaucratic
apparatus and entrenched police machine, had developed a sizable
stake in the status quo of Nep. The existing system, like any system
ever devised, had developed a robust will to survive — to make a
permanent abode of the historical half-way house. In attacking
the talk about “permanent revolution” and more vigorous strug-
gle against Nep, Stalin had voiced the weariness and the despair
of a people surfeited with struggle and sacrifice.

The Party membership itself was in the main content to let
things be. It had been considerably watered in the last years by
the admission of hundreds of thousands of new members without
personal memory or intimate relation to the old revolutionary
struggle. The admixture was largely from the factories. The
diluted Party may have become much more “proletarian,” but
its cultural average was lowered and its contempt for intellectuals
raised. Never much enamored of democratic rights, unable in-
deed to grasp the meaning of such rights, the newcomers were
not impressed with efforts to safeguard the relative internal Party
democracy that had existed under Lenin. The strong-arm methods
of less finicky men were closer to their inherited tastes. As long as
they held their jobs and their privileged status, they were con-
tent to shift the responsibility of thinking upon “practical,” down-
to-earth professional leaders.

Stripped of all secondary factors, the defeat of Trotsky ex-
pressed a genuine and growing annoyance with intellectuals and
idealistic “dreamers,” with world revolution and with new revo-
lutions at home. It reflected a natural yearning to settle down
and bite into the fruits of the revolution.

It was a reaction, when all is said and done, against interna-
tionalists and Westernizers (a large portion of them Jews, it hap-
pened) and a straining back to folk ways and national self-suf-
ficiency. Though not consciously anti-Semitic, the movement had
distinct anti-Semitic undercurrents, in that it reacted against the
Jewish type of mind: idealistic, missionary, and without tough
roots in the Russian soil. To the extent that the reaction turned
inward along national lines, threw off its “duty to the world

i $2 hallelujah!

revolution,” repudiated intellectualism and handed over all power
to divinely inspired leaders, it was distinctly “fascist.”

Stalin’s rough ways may have aroused misgivings in the heart
of the dying Lenin; they aroused a comforting confidence in the
people trained by a thousand years of history to expect and re-
spect naked power, a people distrustful of democratic gadgets.
Stalin might be a swarthy Georgian, but his methods— cunning,
patient, brutal — were Russian compared with the loose idealistic
talk of Westernized alien-minded Lefts.

In adopting the main features of Trotsky’s program, except for
its international implications, Stalin was therefore thumbing his
Ca ucasi an nose at the tides on which he had ridden to the dic-
tatorial apex. Confident that his political machine was now invul-
nerable, he pitted his will against his closest advisers, against the
mass of the population, and against the majority of his Party.

No estimate of popular sentiment, naturally, can ever be made.
I can only record my own certainty at the time that the country
and the Party were overwhelmingly Right and accepted Stalin’s
unexpected course in a sullen and frightened spirit. Every time
the Kremlin in a speech or decree hinted a let-up in socialization,
greater leeway for the abler peasants, more immediate comforts
for the workers, wider private trade — in short, a tendency toward
the Right— the feeling of relief in Moscow was unmistakable.

On the eleventh birthday of the revolution, November 7, 1928,
the course was still uncertain. The Congress of the Comintern
(Communist International) which had ended the month before
had been violent in its language but vague in its practical com-
mitments to action; there was little enough clew to future policy
in its fulminations. After the November holidays, however, things
moved swiftly. The Right point of view, until then tolerated, sud-
denly blossomed into the blackest of heresies. It became, in the
official jargon, the “chief danger.”

Stalin achieved a bloodless victory. Never again was his de-
cision on any matter, large or small, to be questioned. The
“monolithic” Party, a Soviet equivalent for the “totalitarian” par-
ties in fascist countries, was in absolute control. The Russia which
it created in the next few years was as different from the one
bequeathed by Lenin as it was from the tsarist Russia.

IRON MONOLITH

153

3

The face of world communism was to change no less completely.
It takes its coloring always from the domestic Russian situation
and is adjusted to suit the needs of the Soviet state. The Comintern
Congress, the first to be held in four years, met for six weeks,
from July 17 to September 1. Its reverberant generalities thus
came before Stalin’s decisive swing Leftward, but they served as
a foundation for the new world policies of communism elaborated
in the following year.

In the early summer months, foreign communists had begun to
drift into Moscow for the impending Congress. Some of them,
coming from countries where the communist movement is illegal
and therefore “underground,” arrived under strange pseudonyms
on bogus passports. Even certain American representatives, for
reasons that I could not quite figure out, traveled on synthetic
passports. In a few instances documentary materials for these dele-
gates were sent from the United States in my name, presumably
to foil American officials who might be tracing the whereabouts
of these delegates. The owners of each shipment knew of its safe
arrival in Moscow even before the postman delivered it to me:
the contents of my mail were clearly no secret to the postal authori-
ties.

The political complexion of the foreign delegations was dis-
tinctly Right. The American group was captained by Jay Love-
stone, Bertram Wolfe, and others expelled in the following year
for Rightist heresies. In the other national groups were men
like Brandler, Sellier, Kilboor, Roy, Jilek, whose elimination was
likewise in the cards.

The most curious aspect of this conclave of world revolutionists,
indeed, was its apparent domination by men who were soon there-
after discarded. As a test of the real authority of the Congress
and the world-wide movement it ostensibly represented, the fate
of its supposed leaders is enlightening. There was not another
Congress in seven years, until 1935. The policies and activities
of the organization were to undergo profound changes in this
period. But the people who thought they were directing the 1928
gathering, who fought over programs and bargained for advan-

1 54 hallelujah!

tage, were for the most part expelled and branded as agents of
the bourgeoisie in less than a year. The real power, it is all too
evident, rested safely elsewhere and was exercised independently
of the dictates of what was supposedly its highest governing body.

The Comintern is the organization that gives all honest and
not-so-honest capitalist householders nightmares. It may be some
slight consolation to them that it spoils the sleep of Kremlin
leaders as well, though for other reasons. The Soviet regime
is in the uncomfortable position of running a great nation pledged
to keep hands off other nations and simultaneously an international
revolutionary movement pledged to the exact opposite purposes.
It takes consummate jugglery to achieve this with a measure of
grace. The artificial separation of the mutually exclusive functions
may do for diplomatic camouflage. It helps not a bit in solving
practical clashes of interest.

Shall the immense power of the one communist government
be used to promote or at least support communist revolutions
elsewhere? Or shall the influence and. sheer nuisance values of the
international communist forces, on the contrary, be used to pro-
mote the interests of the Soviet government as such? How shall
the day-to-day collisions between the immediate needs of the
U.S.S.R. and the immediate needs of world revolution be ad-
justed? The answers to these questions are obviously loaded with
the dynamite of schism for the Comintern and dangers for the
Soviet Union’s foreign relations. In theory, formulas to conceal
this contradiction have been found. In practice, communists are
continually torn between their loyalties to the first and only com-
munist state and to their native revolutionary movement.

The delegates were far too absorbed in their criss-cross of
political squabbles and the desperate defense of their own titles
to leadership to pay much attention to the Russia of bread lines,
sabotage trials, and political prisoners. The formal reports on
the state of the Soviet Union gave them as much as they needed
for their parochial purposes, so why bother looking out of the
windows? Any extensive organization, be it a church, a peace union,
or an international Rotary, develops an internal life of its own
that blots out the rest of existence. Who should be expelled, who
allowed to run the Communist Party of Ecuador or the United
States, how the trade-union policy would be phrased — such mat-

IRON MONOLITH

155

ters occupied the delegates more than conditions in the Soviet
Union, about which they could learn by turning to the proper
page. American, English, and German delegates with whom I
talked after they had been in Moscow for months showed small
knowledge, let alone understanding, of elementary physical facts
in Russia.

The non-communist press was excluded from the Comintern
deliberations, but the principal speeches were published. Finally
a “manifesto” was launched to the workers of the world and a
program of policies and action was adopted. Precisely because the
complexion of the Congress was Right, its verbal thunder out-
lefted the Lefts. But foreign communists, no matter how meek,
are not as easily managed as Russian communists 5 the threat of
expulsion is not nearly as potent as the threat of concentration
camp. Behind the fagade of unanimous resolutions there was con-
siderable acrid bickering. The manifesto blustered:

This is not a document of timid groveling before the bourgeoisie, nor
of a cringing peace with it. This is not a rotten pharisaic and con-
temptible declaration of unity with the bourgeoisie, a unity which signi-
fies nothing else but treacherous flight into the camp of the class enemy,
desertion, faithlessness, treason. It is rather a guide in the struggle of
millions of the oppressed against their oppressors, in the struggle of the
proletarian masses, in the struggle of the toilers, white, yellow, black,
in the tropics and in the farthermost outposts of the globe, in factories
and on plantations, in mines and on railroads, in forests and deserted
steppes — wherever the class war rages. It is the program of the unity
of the working class and of its mortal struggle against the bourgeoisie.
It is the program of the inevitable world dictatorship of the proletariat.

There is healment for the spirit in a good round bout of cussing
and self-assurance of this sort. After you have suffered humiliation
in China, have sent Lenin’s comrades to Siberia, and been taught
to heed the whip yourself, a spirited manifesto does wonders.
Because the world revolution had been set back in a dozen places,
it is the more “inevitable”! A long array of enemies was chastised
with words of flame. The League of Nations — “that child of Ver-
sailles, the most predatory treaty of recent decades” — came in for
sizzling vituperation. Lying “pacifists” received their quota of
abuse. Renegades, that is to say communists who differed on
dogma, were anathematized in Biblical periods.

156 hallelujah!

But the hottest coals were reserved for the socialists and “re-
formists.” The “Social-Democratic parties have sided with the
oppressors, with the imperialists, the predatory imperialistic gov-
ernments and their agents” in the colonial question. They have
been no less infamous, the manifesto insisted, on every other
issue. In the preceding years Moscow had flirted with reformists
and half-way revolutionists and been led into futile, costly and
undignified adventures in the process. It had joined the Anglo-
Russian Committee, the LaFollette progressive movement, the
Kuomintang in China. Those who denounced such collaboration
with the enemy had been thrown out of the communist fraternity
for their pains. Now the Congress adopted these denunciations
as its very own.

Out of this reversal grew the theory of “social fascism,” ac-
cording to which socialists were really fascist wolves in Marxist
clothing. What the Congress began, the permanent leadership in
Moscow was to develop in the next months to a point where the
disease of collaboration seemed mild by comparison with the cure
of non-cooperation. It was the policy which prevented the demo-
cratic forces anywhere in the world from combining to fight
fascism, which thus received a clear right of way. More than
any other single factor it helped to boost Hitler to dictatorial
heights, to destroy socialism in Austria, and to give fascism a head-
start elsewhere.

The Congress adjourned and its participants scattered to their
respective countries, many of them to be duly expelled as “agents
of the bourgeosie.” Stalin’s success in purging the ranks of the
international movement of Trotskyists and near-Trotskyists had
finished what there was of self-government within the movement.
Thereafter expulsions of dissidents by one and by thousands be-
came commonplace. Whatever doubt there may have been as to
which was the kite and which the tail was ended.

Internationally, even as inside Russia, the “monolithic” Party
— a Party run entirely from headquarters in Moscow — was an
established fact.

IX. Savor of Life

IN ONE respect, at least, Moscow is exactly like every other
place I have ever visited. Its weather, in view of natives, is “un-
usual.” Thus my first autumn under the hammer and sickle was
protracted and slushy as never before — a circumstance that held
true every subsequent autumn. You wore galoshes, which placards
commanded you to remove in the vestibule wherever you went.
You spent half your time, or so it seemed, standing on line to
deposit them and the other half to retrieve them. At crowded
house parties someone always walked off in all innocence with your
new pair and left leaky ones in their stead; sometimes they were
both for the right foot, perhaps as a subtle political insult. The
rarest thing in Moscow was a trouser cuff without mud on it.

It is comforting to record that even in the arena of an epochal
revolution the vagaries of the weather provide the staples of
conversation. Only the subject of food received more social at-
tention. The extraterritorial privileges for foreigners in the mat-
ter of food were not yet organized. It took practically all the time
of one person to round up provisions for a family. People looked
back regretfully to the ample days of six months ago, when the
private market at Hunters Row flourished. You discussed the new
“Party line” and the bread line or kerosene line with equal in-
tensity: they were not entirely unrelated.

The one crop that never fails in the new Russia is the crop
of politically off-color jokes. These stories spring from the soil
of immediate conditions and preoccupations and are therefore sig-
nificant. Many of them are so intimately related to the news of
the day that they make no sense out of that context. They are
parables that circulate with lightning speed, sharpened and given
new twists as they spread. A large collection of this acid humor
arranged chronologically would constitute a history of the revo-
lution — caricatured, it is true, but easily recognizable. Much later
I toyed with the idea of such a tour de force . I jotted down hun-

157

158 hallelujah!

dreds of stories, but my patience gave out. Current jokes were
not only available, but unavoidable. The “latest” was whispered
in your ear a dozen times a day. But the older ones were not easily
garnered. People who had written them down were afraid to
admit it. The G.P.U. has a special division to gather and conserve
this bitter-sweet humor. One of these days the archive will be
opened to historians who will write serious tomes tracing the
social conditions which gave rise to new cycles of anecdotes.

The bumper harvest of such stifled and unhappy merriment was
to spring in the near future from the food shortage. Already the
early pre-ration food jokes were being spread. You asked someone,
“How are you getting on?” and he replied, “Lootche tchem
zahvtra — better than tomorrow.” Or he said, “Oh, like Lenin
in his mausoleum.” “How do you mean that?” you inquired,
knowing that a joke impended. “Because they neither feed us nor
bury us,” was the answer.

But the Stalin-Trotsky battle was still the major target of the
underground humorists. One of them represented Stalin, after
having banished Trotsky, summoning to the Kremlin a rabbi
famed for his learning and wisdom. “My rival is out of the way,
and I am committed to building socialism in one country,” Stalin
told the sage, “and yet I am not certain that it can be done.
You are a wise man. I command you to tell me truly, without
fear, whether it is possible to build socialism in one country.”
The rabbi replied that he could not answer such a difficult question
without consulting the sacred books and pondering deeply. He
was given three days to ponder. At the end of that time he re-
turned.

“Well,” Stalin asked eagerly, “have you the answer?”

“I have,” the rabbi said. “I have consulted the holy texts and
thought a great deal.”

“What is it? What is it?”

“Well, I can assure you that it is altogether possible to build
socialism in one country. But to live in that country — that’s im-
possible.”

Though grave decisions were being made within the Kremlin
walls and the whole nation was in a state of nervous uncertainty,
individual men and women were of necessity riveted to their
commonplaces of work, pleasure, and petty worries. Political and

SAVOR OF LIFE

159

economic facts were the raw stuff of a correspondent’s day-to-day
job, but his life was not lived on an austere level of political
analysis. Trifles loomed enormous on the horizon of their own
day— particularly the morsels of “spot news” and the details of
their transmission.

My chief competitor was the plenipotentiary of the Associated
Press. The A.P. had an exclusive contract for the exchange of
news with the one and only Soviet agency, Tass, which was the
chief and frequently sole repository of information in the Soviet
Union. This meant that the rest of us had to connive and sweat.
There were “leaks” and one learned tricks for circumventing the
opposition’s advantages. The home offlce, moreover, was well aware
of the handicap and pardoned inevitable beatings ; the situation
even gave one a perfect alibi on beatings that were by no means
inevitable. Yet I carried perpetually the feeling that something
important was happening. Not merely without my knowledge,
which was bad enough, but with the knowledge of the Associated
Press, which was a lot worse. That feeling was a constant in six
years when everything else kept changing.

There was no lack of diversions. In Moscow the correspondents
were lumped with the diplomatic corps for formal social pur-
poses. Soviet receptions to the diplomats automatically included
us; and diplomatic functions in any of the old merchants’ palaces
now used as Embassy residences similarly brought us invitations.
I met diplomats and their ladies whom I continued to greet
warmly for six years without quite learning their names or quite
remembering their countries. The diplomatic type, especially in the
lower registers, is fairly standardized. How was I to distinguish
between a Scandinavian and a Greek Third Secretary when they
made the same vapid remarks and smiled the same non-committal
smile and were as uncertain of my identity as I was of theirs?
Since I did not play bridge and could not distinguish one cham-
pagne from another, I remained always on the periphery of diplo-
matic circles.

National holidays of the various countries, royal birthdays
and the like meant diplomatic parties. You went for the food,
the helpful rumors, and because everybody else went. You always
found the same Russians. The fact that they were in dress clothes,
their wives in evening gowns and jewels, soothed your radical

160 hallelujah!

conscience. But always there was an undertow of guilt, to be
wearing a starched shirt and stretching your equator with sturgeon,
caviar, imported fruits, and a dozen kinds of meats and cheeses
while around the corner long queues waited all night for a little
bread or herring. The Foreign Office crowd was there ; sometimes
the censors 5 always General Budenny of cavalry fame, with his
brand-new, curly-headed peasant wife; young and buxom Madame
Lunacharsky in foreign finery; the diminutive and thoroughly
urbane Comrade Baron Steiger;* the red-faced Chef de Protocol
Florinsky,f the large, handsome Red Army Commander Tukha-
chevsky,! and a few others. You came to expect a lavish table
at the Polish and Oriental receptions and more abstemious fare
in certain other embassies.

For amplitude of provisions, music and entertainment, how-
ever, the Soviet Union’s own receptions had no rival. On the eve-
ning of November yth the government, in the person of Presi-
dent Kalinin, was host to the foreign colony. Half a dozen com-
missars, including War Lord Voroshilov, were in evidence, as
well as a handful of the more famous Russian literary men. Only
Kalinin was in workaday clothes, everyone else being correctly
decked in formal black or uniforms. Coming on the heels of the
great mass demonstration on Red Square, in a city ablaze with red
lights and bunting, the party was not without its obvious ironies.
I shall never forget the bafflement and anger of the correspond-
ent of the New York Jewish Freiheit , a communist paper, when
he was excluded from such a reception because he lacked a din-
ner jacket. That blow to his proletarian pride, I would wager,
was not confided to his readers. In later years the formalities were
relaxed on the revolutionary anniversary, apparently as a result
of the gibes which correspondents could not resist.

2

Two “cultural” anniversaries in this season were to remain in
Moscow’s memory as a reminder of the more tolerant atmos-
phere on the eve of the Five Year Plan era. They were the cele-

* Executed in December, 1937*
f Exiled from Moscow about 1934.

$ Executed, along with seven other Army chiefs, in June, 1937.

SAVOR OF LIFE

1 6 1

brations of the centennary of Tolstoy’s birth and the thirtieth
birthday of the Moscow Art Theatre, respectively. Both Tolstoy
and the Moscow Art Theatre are far from the Bolshevik regime
in spirit, but the Kremlin did itself proud on these occasions,
notwithstanding. That inveterate and eloquent speechmaker, Ana-
tole Lunacharsky, then Commissar of Education, orated for two
hours at each celebration. The story was told in Russia of a fire
that was blazing while a crowd looked on. The fire brigades were
there and the roof was falling in, but they did nothing to arrest
the conflagration. They could not get started — because Lunachar-
sky had not yet arrived to make the opening address. . . .

As a Christian anarchist, pacifist, humanitarian, and mystic,
Count Tolstoy, had he been alive, could scarcely have supported
the Bolshevik cause. Scores of Tolstoyans were even then in
prison and exile for their anti-Soviet attitudes. For those ac-
quainted with these facts the festivities were both cynical and
tragic. But for Stefan Zweig and other foreign guests who traveled
to Yasnaya Polyana, the great writer’s estate, the proceedings
were presumably grave enough and impressive. Lunacharsky’s
impassioned eulogy conveniently avoided discussion of Tolstoy’s
beliefs insofar as they ran counter to Soviet ideology. The aged
Alexandra Lvovna, daughter of Tolstoy, faithful to her father’s
ideas, had driven a sharp bargain with the new masters for coun-
tenancing the celebration. She obtained the virtual lifting in Poly-
ana of Soviet laws that violated her father’s philosophy. For
a while, therefore, the Tolstoy school on her old estate was the
only one in all of Russia that did not teach atheism or militarism.
After escaping from Russia several years later, Alexandra Lvovna
wrote a moving and bitter book accusing the Soviet government
of arresting and betraying herself and other Tolstoyans.

The Moscow Art Theatre anniversary celebration, in the spacious
and ornate Big Theatre, was an extraordinary scene. Its aroma
does not easily fade from memory, for it was the aroma of cam-
phor. Furs, silks, laces, brocades, and black broadcloth packed
away since 1917 were drawn out once more by surviving members
of the suppressed classes. Whatever remained of the bourgeois
intelligentsia ventured timidly from its crevices and corners to
pay homage to Vladimir Stanislavsky and the intellectual tradi-
tion that his theater represented. Sartorially it was a revival al-

1 62 hallelujah!

most of the styles of 1900-19 17, with only the foreigners in full
dress and the Soviet officials in Soviet clothes to mar the period.
Though Stalin and other leaders were present and the whole cere-
mony a gesture of respect for Russia’s cultural heritage, the W ork-
ers Gazette was goaded by the scene into making the bold remark
that “all ranks of the proletarian state were invited to celebrate
the anniversary except the workers.”

An additional impetus to my natural interest in the amusement
arts was given by an invitation to “cover” the Soviet domain for
Variety , the most influential American trade journal in the theatri-
cal and related fields. It was an excellent discipline, forcing me
to follow this phase of Russian life a lot more closely than other
correspondents needed to. Quite aside from the pleasure I got out
of it, the attention was not without value in the way of politi-
cal guidance. The stage and even more so the screen are highly
sensitive barometers of pressure under a regime of complete ar-
tistic censorship.

Variety is written in a hard-boiled and picturesque jargon all
its own. Only seasoned readers can really interpret all its verbal
short-cuts and Broadway allusions. For nearly five years every-
thing that appeared in its pages out of Russia, whether signed
or not, was mine. The authentic Variety slang was above my
acrobatic skill. But it was fun trying, a little like learning a new
language. Eventually a sentence of mine received the accolade
of public recognition as genuinely in the Variety manner: proof
that my devotion was not altogether wasted. In an erudite article
on the remarkable style of this journal, Gilbert Seldes quoted
a sentence in which I reported that the only “love interest” in
Eisenstein’s film The New and the Old was provided by the mating
of a bull and a cow.

A Russian-American tenor of great personal charm and talent,
Sergei Radamsky, and his lovely blonde wife, Marie Williams,
gave a series of concerts that autumn. The Russian public took
with great enthusiasm to their Negro spirituals. Something primi-
tive and intense in these songs touched the Russian heart} per-
haps their blend of joy and sorrow so familiar to Russians in their
own folk plaints. Soviet audiences, however, were not aware of the
religious implications of the spirituals. Musical programs, like
everything else, must pass a censorship. Had the Radamskys’

SAVOR OF LIFE

163

repertory been Russian instead o£ English, the Negro hymns
would never have passed muster. As it is there were awkward
moments. One evening, at the Moscow Conservatory, Sergei had
rendered All God’s Chillun Got Shoes. It evoked great applause
and a clamor for its repetition. After he had acceded and again
been rewarded with an ovation, someone sent up a note.

“Will Citizen Radamsky please explain to us what the song
is about,” the note suggested.

For a moment the tenor looked non-plussed — and tenors, as
everyone knows, do not easily non-plus. Then he remembered that
deception is the best policy. He explained:

“You see, comrades, it is about poor black slaves who live in
misery. They have no shoes, no robes — only work and sorrow.
But they dream of the beautiful future, after the revolution has
freed them, when they will all have shoes, robes and the things
their hearts desire.”

A satire put on by Tairov’s Kamerny Theatre and quickly
squelched was the most memorable theatrical event of the sea-
son. It was by Michael Bulgakov, the author of Days of the Tur-
binSy and showed his remarkable versatility. It was called The
Purple Island. As devastating a take-off on stupid censorship as
ever was written, its dynamite was so neatly concealed that it ac-
tually reached the public and survived a few performances. The
action is set in a provincial theater with a play in rehearsal. It
is a vapid melodrama with music. As the rehearsals proceed, the
self-important provincial censors — blood brothers of their Moscow
betters — discover ideological flaws. One questions the “class line”
and the accommodating director instantly turns the rollicking
sailors into class-conscious proletarians. Another finds fault with
the attitude toward colonial and semi-colonial peoples, a third
protests that the campaign for potato culture has not been given
its due. The play is revised on the spot and emerges in the final
act as a hilarious burlesque on inept propaganda drama.

Many a pompous policeman of the arts in that first-night audi-
ence must have squirmed in his seat. The banning of the play,
the second of Bulgakov’s to win that compliment in one year,
was sufficient proof that the farce had not exaggerated. Bulgakov
was barred from the theater for a period, then allowed to return
as a director of other people’s works for the Moscow Art. His

1 6 4 HALLELUJAH !

subtle revenge was the play Moliere, in rehearsal when I left
Russia. Ostensibly an anti-religious drama, showing a French
playwright of old persecuted by Jesuits, the parallel with his own
hounding by Bolshevik Jesuits is perfectly evident.

In the beauty of the Soviet theater, ballet, and opera— in the
deep charm of the Russians as a people— in the sheer excitement
of absorbing a new world — I found ample compensations for
disappointments and intruding doubts. As mirrored in my writing
the new Utopia was still nearly perfect.

3

At last the city was matted with snow. Melancholy twilights
came once more soon after noon to erase brief overcast days.
Something unreal and subdued, like the tinkle and glitter of North-
ern fairy tales, filled the air. The darkness was studded with
tiny nails of light} detached church domes and towers seemed
to float overhead. Once more diminutive sleighs glided by noise-
lessly, the double-decker windows were puttied for the winter,
people were bizarrely padded and swathed in heavy scarfs. Mos-
cow settled back into the long nights when it is most like itself,
somber, mysterious, and timeless.

Cutting winds raced through the walled-in silences of the Krem-
lin, where about a thousand visitors from all parts of the vast
Soviet empire were gathered for the world’s strangest “parlia-
ment,” the Tzik or Central Executive Committee of the nation.
About half of them were delegates elected by the last All-Union
Congress of Soviets} the rest were invited spectators. The func-
tion of both groups was about the same: to listen, applaud, and
return home with tidings of the Soviet government’s strength
and wisdom. The “legislative” powers of the Tzik, except on
paper, were limited to raising hands for unanimous approval of
whatever was submitted by the government.

Under the turrets from which tsars watched their enemies slain
by the executioners in Red Square, these parliamentarians wan-
dered through the ancient Kremlin, stopping to gaze at the Byzan-
tine contortions of centuries-old churches, touching the cannons
captured from the first Napoleon. Most of them simple workers
and peasants and provincial communist officials, their mere pres-

SAVOR OF LIFE

165

ence within the Kremlin walls must have seemed to them a thing
for endless wonderment. Their additional dignity as “legisla-
tors/ 5 however empty of real meaning, must have raised the won-
derment to a sort of miracle.

They were the strangest agglomeration, these new rulers in
whose name laws were promulgated and plans were launched and
a nation’s life turned upside down. Close-packed on straight
wooden benches in the Great Kremlin Palace, they presented an
amazing patchwork of races and cultures. Though it was eleven
years after the revolution, they looked a little like intruders ob-
viously overawed by the marble and crystal and magnificence of
the setting. Many of them, perhaps, had only learned to read
and write in the last year or two. Neither slogans nor Marxist
formulas could express the marvel of their waking dream.

Perhaps I was reading more into their earnest demeanor than
was really there. This was only my second view of the Soviet
“parliament” in session, and I was almost as impressed and ex-
cited as the delegates themselves. I called to mind the dignity
of an American Senate, a German Reichstag, the House of Com-
mons — the atmosphere of pompous worldly success, social emi-
nence, sartorial respectability, and the buzz of connivings in a
bourgeois legislative chamber. Not eleven years, but eleven cen-
turies separated that memory from the huddled mass of Soviet
legislators before me. Rough-hewn faces of men and women from
the mills and fields. Faces ingrained with soot and grime. Stolid
expressionless faces of old men from Siberia. Be-tufbaned, gray-
bearded faces from the Asiatic deserts. Youthful, eager faces from
Moscow and Leningrad and Kharkov factories. Few had troubled
to shave for the occasion and men rubbed the thick stubble medi-
tatively as Kalinin called the session to order. It seemed to me not
a parliament but a new world in solemn session. Why cavil about
their powers or legal status? If only as a pageant of the emerging
new order their role seemed to me to transcend that of legislators
in any other land.

In the Hall of St. Andrew where the sessions are held, huge
square pillars, thickly crusted with gold embellishments, grow
into a richly inlaid vaulted ceiling. Immense clusters of crystal
lights set all the ornaments of the former ballroom ablaze. But
from each of the pillars grew two large black radio horns— the

1 66 hallelujah!

new grafted upon the old, the utilitarian imposed upon the merely
magnificent. A steep rostrum was built across the front end of
the great chamber, where once stood a monarch’s throne. A red-
draped table ran the length of this rostrum and behind it sat
leaders of the Soviet dictatorship. Stalin, too, was among them,
but sitting a little farther back, chatting now with one, now with
another of the men on the platform. He was there as a guest
merely, not being a member of this august assemblage. Over the
rostrum the portrait of Lenin smiled down on the gathering and
on the opposite wall was the severe face of Karl Marx.

I sat among the correspondents in the press box. In an adjoin-
ing box were the diplomats of all nations. For all of us this “par-
liament” was unique, strange. But for me, perhaps for one or
two others, it was stirring beyond the compass of such hackneyed
words.

I watched a peasant woman, dull-eyed and rather scared, try-
ing to follow Rykov’s exposition of the grandiose plans for in-
dustrializing her country. She represented, perhaps, a quarter of
a million peasants like herself. Rykov spoke simply, forcibly, de-
spite the impediment of a stammer. (His successor as Premier,
Molotov, also suffered from the same impediment, though not
quite so markedly.) Rykov was reputed to be a heavy drinker —
vodka was called “rykovka” in some quarters. But his long, deeply-
lined face, with its straggly beard, under a shock of unkempt
hair, seemed ascetic: the type, I thought, of the pre-revolutionary
idealist. The effort of following his exposition was too much for
the peasant woman and she gave up : her interest lagged and died
and her strained expression relaxed. She took out a pen-knife
and pared her nails, smiling at her own thoughts, as the Premier
unrolled a few more billions’ worth of plans.

Two young legislators, a boy and a girl, thinking themselves
unobserved, held hands and looked into one another’s eyes, as
though in a movie theater, as the intricacies of the agrarian poli-
cies were expounded to them.

Individuals here and there may have amused me. The pre-
tense that they legislate for a sixth part of the globe may be for
gullible children. But the gathering in its entirety was a match
for my expectations; it was a conclave inconceivable under any
other regime. The last were indeed first.

SAVOR OF LIFE

167

For some ten days, the Tzik met in the gold-and-white splen-
dors of the Great Palace, listened to hours-long speeches bristling
with millions and billions. One evening Litvinov spoke to them
of great world affairs, of his proposals for total disarmament
and partial disarmament and the refusal of the capitalist world
to act. That was something to carry back to a town or village in
the heart of the Urals or Siberia!

After each of the major speeches, individual Tzik members took
the floor and discussed the subject from the angle of their own
localities. They never disagreed with the main speakers — such
an audacity would never even occur to them. But they elaborated
on the points he raised, citing examples from the local experi-
ence and pointing to problems that the government in its infinite
wisdom might deign to consider. There might be little they could
add to Litvinov’s report on international relations or Kuibishev’s
on the basic plans for industrialization. But they were eloquent
in denouncing the local bureaucrats who prevented the comple-
tion of a road in their township or some other such detail. To the
shrewd leaders of men on the platform these hints and suggestions
and meek complaints were valuable indices to the conditions and
the state of mind of the country.

On the face of it the government was reporting to its parlia-
ment. In fact it was the parliament reporting to and petitioning
its government.

Stalin’s decision to steer the nation far to the Left had al-
ready been made. The Tzik resolutions neither added nor sub-
tracted anything, but merely embodied his decision in legal forms.
They were adopted unanimously. No dissenting voice, to my
knowledge, has ever shocked this legislature. The thought of a
lone delegate voting against a proposal from high places is so
inconceivable that it seems a grotesquerie. The Tzik was not a
law-making body in the Western sense. At most it was another
technique of propaganda: a method for giving the population a
sense of participation in big affairs, and a channel for conveying
the wishes, the threats, and the promises of the dictatorship to the
masses.

A five-year plan of agrarian socialization was voted, and a five-
year plan of industrialization. The contours were left sufficiently
vague to permit the planning authorities to work them out in de-

1 68 hallelujah!

tail. The Five Year Plan which the world was to exclaim over
was not formulated and made public until some months later.
No shadow of doubt, however, was left that Stalin had signaled
full speed ahead towards the ultimate eradication of private own-
ership in both farming and industry. Every Tzik member must
have departed with a distinct premonition, at once exalting and
frightening, of immense purposes to be carried through at im-
mense cost.

I shared that premonition. And I was content that I had reached
the one proletarian country on the edge of a new epoch.

There was plenty for our forebodings to feed upon. Counsel
of desperation prevailed in the Kremlin in its treatment of the
peasantry. The methods used were described by the correspondents,
with much exaggeration but much justice as well, as a “revival
of militant communism against the peasants.” It was a violation of
the Kremlin’s solemn promises of a few months before; the
peasant population came to regard the government’s word as so
much empty sound. In the cities the ultimate fear— fear of the
disappearance of bread — led to panicky hoarding. Men and women
waited throughout the night in sub-zero weather to buy a little
more bread in the morning. In the factories and mines and on
construction jobs, the engineers and technicians, tarred with the
brush of counter-revolution by the Shakhty trial, became hunted
creatures, presumed to be guilty of treachery and sabotage by the
mere fact that they were “bourgeois intellectuals,” educated people
of the pre-revolutionary days.

In this atmosphere of strain 1928 ended. The foreigners cele-
brated New Year’s Eve at the hotels in counterfeit gaiety. Rus-
sians met the New Year in lively but surreptitious parties. It
was not quite respectable to recognize the Christian calendar in
this fashion, but habit prevailed. At the party which I attended
there were communists as hilarious under the influence of vodka
and gramophone music as anyone else. Christmas trees had been
bootlegged in the capital despite the official ban on this remnant
of ancient superstition. One of them stood in the corner in full
view of the sardonic plaster Lenin looking down from the mantel-
piece.

The year that began with the exile of Trotsky ended with the
adoption of the major planks of his program. The year that opened

SAVOR OF LIFE

169

with the crushing of the Left Opposition ended with a heresy
hunt against the Right Opposition. It had taken Stalin six years
to destroy the first 5 less than six months would suffice to destroy
the second. While fighting Trotsky, the new leader had perfected
the mechanism of his power. It was now a flawless machine, the
most potent, considering the scope of its dominion, ever built in
all history.

X. Life is Rationed

IF HELL is efficiently departmentalized, the large section re-
served for foreign correspondents will have a special torture tc
dispense. It will provide its guests with juicy and exciting morsels
of news but cut off all channels of communication with then
newspapers.

We had a foretaste of that agony at the end of January, 1929.
Most, if not all, of us knew that Leon Trotsky and members
of his family had been withdrawn from their place of exile in
Alma-Ata and were being zigzagged across the U.S.S.R. on their
way to Turkey. Each of us carried the scorching hot news care-
fully under his coat, praying that other correspondents did not
have it and would not have it until we had succeeded in transmit-
ting it. But there was the rub. The censors would not let us send
anything 5 they pretended to know nothing about it.

International telephone connections, which in later years en-
abled us to beat the censorship when the news deserved the risk,
had not yet been opened. We could, and ultimately did, use the
mails, especially the diplomatic pouches of friendly legations. But
a resident newspaperman thinks long and earnestly before circum-
venting the censors on a story which they have specifically for-
bidden. The longer we carried the news the more painfully it
burned into our professional flesh.

Negley Farson had replaced Junius Wood for the Chicago
Daily News and we teamed up for mutual assistance $ these alli-
ances are not unusual in places like Moscow, where information
is scarce and vague. When he phoned excitedly and talked of a
big story, I linked it immediately to rumors I had picked up in
other quarters. We met to compare notes.

“But it sounds cuckoo,” Negley said. “Why should Stalin let
his Number One Enemy out of his personal control and send
him where he can shoot his mouth off? Maybe our story is cock-
eyed after all.”

170

LIFE IS RATIONED

171

“It does seem incredible,” I agreed, “but Trotsky has been
pretty sick, I hear, and it may be Stalin doesn’t want him to die
on his hands. Just imagine what a stink it would raise if Trot-
sky did die suddenly. Everybody would say that he was done to
death.”

For days we hugged the knowledge to our breasts, convinced
that we had a “world scoop” but almost powerless to make use
of it. Not until later did we realize that nearly every one of
our competitors held the same mistaken conviction. I experimented
with different ways of hinting the news to the home office, but
could get none of it beyond the censors’ blue pencil.

The censorship that had seemed to me mild suddenly became
harsh, insuperable. Censorships are always liberal — until they have
something to conceal.

Negley’s courage exceeded my own. He sent the news in the
diplomatic dispatch bag to a neighboring capital, whence it was
flashed to Chicago. But I succeeded in getting it to the United
Press the same day. Sergei Trivas, of Voks and the G.P.U., ar-
rived for one of his frequent social visits. He broached the subject
without prodding.

“Have you heard about Leon Davidovich?” he asked. Davido-
vich is Trotsky’s patronymic.

“Of course I have.”

“Well, why don’t you send it?”

“The censors turn thumbs down on any reference to the sub-
ject,” I sighed.

“I don’t have to tell you how to get around that, do I?” Sergei
smiled.

About this time it dawned on me that he was speaking under
instructions. While the Foreign Office was formally denying the
whole thing with its usual vehemence, the G.P.U. was not averse
to having the news leak out indirectly and a little incorrectly.

“Well, I could send it as a private message to Billy in New
York,” I ventured. (My family had returned to America for
several months.) “Do you suppose it will go through — and that
Pll be hauled over the coals here when it does?”

“Just send it,” he now winked. “I assure you it is all right.
Just say that L.D. is going to Turkey of his own free will.”

Eventually it appeared that Trotsky was expelled from his

172 hallelujah!

native land by sheer force, protesting every inch of the way.
Trivas had probably been mobilized to inspire my breach of cen-
sorship with a view to spreading a contrary impression. In any
case Billy received my mysterious message, a code word being
used in place of Trotsky’s name, and telephoned it to the United
Press. The dispatch was published under a London dateline for
my protection. Whether it was the first authentic news of the fallen
War Lord’s deportation to be published was a disputed point for
months, as if it mattered to anyone but ourselves.

Fully a week after the whole world had displayed the news on
its front pages, the Moscow correspondents were permitted by the
Foreign Office to hint at it in their censored cables. For the Rus-
sian population it remained a vague and dangerous rumor, until
it was confirmed in a few lines among the trivial “miscellaneous
news” on inside pages.

To Stalin, no doubt, it seemed shrewd to push Trotsky beyond
the Soviet boundaries. For a brief period the expulsion shocked
and titillated world opinion. Then it was forgotten. Trotsky in
banishment in Central Asia, the caged lion with Stalin as keeper,
was a more dramatic and touching figure than Trotsky in Tur-
key. In Asiatic exile his voice had a resonance it lacked outside. A
short message smuggled out by Stalin’s prisoner had more effect
than a long article by Trotsky, the deportee. With the leader gone,
moreover, the Left Opposition inside the U.S.S.R. lost its sense
of cohesion.

Trotsky’s deportation was preceded by a series of exciting events.
Wild r um ors of another sweeping round-up of his suspected fol-
lowers over a period of weeks were finally confirmed in an official
announcement that one hundred and fifty Trotskyists had been
arrested, tried in secret, and condemned to long terms of “rigorous
isolation.” Among them were men and women well-known in
political, scientific and literary circles.

The announcement was backed up by accusations more startling
than any laid at the door of the Trotsky faction before. The
G.P.U. had uncovered the underground press which was flooding
Moscow and Leningrad with leaflets. It had disrupted an “under-
ground railroad,” so-called, whereby exiles communicated with one
another and with friends abroad. Tricks perfected in the revolu-
tionary movement under tsarism, brushed off and used once more

LIFE IS RATIONED

173

in the same Siberia, the same cellars and garrets, with the same
fervor and at infinitely greater hazard! But the present rulers
had themselves been on the subversive side of the struggle in
the old days. They knew and called every trick.

1

The renewed warfare on the Left Opposition, coupled with
furious attacks on “Right deviators,” raised a miasma of fears
over life in Moscow. The crushing sense of terror was strongest
in the ruling Party itself 3 summary arrests and imprisonments
of communists with long revolutionary records were an everyday
occurrence. As for the small fry in the Party, an unguarded word
or a malicious anonymous denunciation meant a search of their
homes, exile, or worse. Men in positions of authority one day
were mysteriously missing the next day and you never saw them
again. Something furtive and hunted came into the manner of
minor officials in Soviet offices that remained throughout the next
period. It became almost the mark of their calling.

People shied away more nervously than ever from conversa-
tion that might be misconstrued as remotely political. They went
carefully through their address books and private papers and
destroyed traces of anyone who might be in the bad graces of the
government. Those whose homes were searched or whose relatives
were under arrest, became instantly contagious creatures to be
shunned by their fellow-men. The most pestilential breed of all,
of course, were foreigners. Only the more daring or more fool-
hardy Russians ventured within their infected orbit.

The groundswell of distrust of pre-revolutionary intellectuals
— engineers, technicians, scientists and other specialized work-
ers — started by the Shakhty trial, inundated factories and in-
stitutions throughout the country. Suspicion of the so-called “tech-
nical intelligentsia” quickly expanded to the proportions of a na-
tional phobia.

A chisika or cleansing of the ranks was carried through in
the Communist Party and in the Comsomol (Communist Youth)
League, tens of thousands being expelled for small reason or
none. A new Puritanism was setting in which regarded amusement
and laughter as politically immoral. Dancing and card-playing

174 hallelujah!

and gypsy music and vaudeville without a political lesson had
flourished under Nep. Therefore these things now became sym-
bols of bourgeois degeneracy.” Communists found themselves
deprived of their membership in the ruling order because they
lived too expansively, drank too much, or were in some other way
unworthy examples for the proletariat. But above all they were
expelled for heretical thoughts. The cleansing was retroactive 5
hundreds in every city and town were punished for views they
had expressed in former years, when open internal controversy
was still permitted.

Another and more far-reaching chistka was launched in offices,
banks, museums, the thousand and one government institutions. Its
purpose was to ferret out and expel “class enemy elements” who
might be “hiding” in respectable positions. Hundreds of thou-
sands of “former” people, the remnants of the pre-revolutionary
upper classes, merchants, priests, socialists, Tolstoyans, had in
fact adjusted themselves to the new system and were working as
unobtrusively as possible in government service. Twelve years
after the revolution, most of those of the “declassed” people
who survived were of necessity earning their livings in some cor-
ner of the great government machine. For years they had been
unmolested. They thought themselves safely forgotten in their
crevices. Now they were pried out into the open and stepped on
without pity. The liquidation of Nepmen, in addition, had in the
last year or two driven them for sanctuary into official enterprises,
especially in the distribution end of Soviet economy. They, too,
were ordered out. No one in the ruling circles even raised the
question as to how these outlawed masses would live now that
they were deprived of a chance to labor. To hint any concern
in that direction was “bourgeois sentimentality.”

A thousand incidents crowd to my mind. A meek old man who
had been bookkeeper in a government office for many years now
cast out as a class enemy. A young teacher dismissed because her
father had been a shopkeeper. A student in the technical school
thrown out for “concealing his social origin” by claiming descent
from a poor peasant when, as a matter of fact, his father had owned
four cows. “Nests of former people” uncovered in museums,
libraries, or research institutions: broken-down middle-aged and

LIFE IS RATIONED 175

elderly people suddenly hounded from their jobs solely because
of their “social origin.”

A sharp increase in street beggary marked these initial months
of 1929. The whining professional mendicants who followed one
for blocks if they were not bought off with a few coins were
familiar enough. So were the peasant families in fantastic rags
huddled in a heap on the sidewalk looking with pleading eyes at
every passer-by until a militiaman came to drive them away.
But now there were new types on the Tverskaya, Dmitrovka,
Petrovka and Kuznetsky Most. Old men and women, with some-
thing of dignity in their bearing despite threadbare clothes and
heads bowed in shame, stood against walls with hands timidly out-
stretched for alms. I recall a blond consumptive-looking man, still
young and aristocratic in his bearing but incredibly ragged, whom
I passed every day on my way to and from the censorship office;
he held out his hand silently and pretended not to notice when
coins were dropped into it.

Another sign of the renewed pressure on the byvshiye — “former
people” — was the sudden opulence of the “commission shops.”
These emporia, several on every main street, either bought goods
outright from individuals and resold them for several times as
much, or accepted articles for sale on a percentage basis. They
now began to fill up with antiques, silver, furs, old furniture, rare
ceramics, paintings, miniatures, jewelry, rugs. The remnants of pre-
revolutionary wealth, salvaged somehow through twelve years of
revolution and confiscation, were drawn out of their hiding places
and turned into cash. Foreigners were the most avid buyers, though
Russians in the higher income brackets bought heavily too.

Most fearful of all for its victims was the process of disfranchise-
ment then under way. The right to vote was cherished not for
itself, since it is an empty gesture, but because to be deprived of
it was equivalent to being branded as an enemy of the revolution.
In connection with elections to the Soviets, special commissions
everywhere were drawing up lists of those entitled to vote and
stringently excluding the better-to-do peasants, those in any wise
tarred with the pitch of Nep trade, anyone whose social origin
was unsatisfactory, people who for a thousand reasons had in-
curred the displeasure of the Soviet regime.

These became lishentsi, disfranchised people, without any rights

176 hallelujah!

or legal standing. To be among the lishentsi was to be an outcast.
They could not work in government enterprises, except in the
lowest categories of “black” or unskilled labor. Their children were
the last to be admitted into elementary or higher schools, which
under conditions of overcrowded schooling meant that they were
not admitted at all. When food rationing was introduced, from
the end of March forward, they were denied rations. When re-
visions of the rights to occupy “living space” were undertaken, the
lishentsi were the first to be ejected from their homes.

In their totality the number of these pariahs (even babies were
not spared) came to millions. Those in the villages survived until
the “liquidation of kulaks as a class” the following year, when they
were driven from their homes into inhospitable regions to live or
to die. How did the others, in the cities, manage to live, denied
work or food rations, harried from their living quarters, burdened
with taxes and subjected to refined cruelties? I asked this ques-
tion of officials, communist friends, ordinary Russians in the fol-
lowing years, because it was a fascinating mystery. None of them
could give me a satisfactory answer, except the amazing tenacity
of the human animal in clinging somehow to life.

Part of the answer of course is that a large proportion of them
did not survive. Suicide and death from the diseases of under-
nourishment decimated their ranks. The rest hung on to existence
somehow with bleeding fingers, doing odd jobs, teaching, beg-
ging, “smuggling” themselves into jobs by lying about their status
only to be exposed and driven out again before long. Only Hitler’s
treatment of the Jews in Germany a few years later gave the
world anything resembling this systematic persecution of a large
class of the population.

Partly because of fear and even more so because of the food dif-
ficulties, Russians gradually ceased to entertain. Social life was
muted. Those with the money or political influence to obtain
enough food for a party, now conducted it in a kind of secrecy.
It suddenly became both disgraceful and dangerous to eat bet-
ter, dress better, or enjoy life more fully, than those around one.
There was a renewal of the asceticism that characterized the
first years of the revolution, only more of it now was protective
coloration, hypocrisy rather than necessity or conviction. The chief

LIFE IS RATIONED 1 77

good in life was to be unobstrusive, because therein lay the chief
safety.

The shadow of the new epoch was settling over the land. It
was to deepen visibly month by month and was not to lift for
nearly five years. Its gloom entered into the very fiber of existence.
Life was suddenly precarious, even its enthusiasm touched with
melancholy.

3

The first “demands” for the rationing of bread and other foods
were heard from factories all over the country when winter was
at its crudest. The people on lines wound shawls and scarfs around
their heads so that only their bleared eyes were visible. They
stamped and shuffled in their places and flapped their arms for
warmth, a dance without joy. When you crossed the threshold
into the street, the frost sprang at you furiously. The windows
in street-cars were coated with hoar-frost and you thawed out a
tiny peep-hole with your breath to see where you were going:
thousands of sharp, round little holes in the white windows, as
though the ghost-like cars had been riddled with bullets. In the
markets old men and women stood all day in the cold as in a
torture chamber over the debris of their past — a few spoons, a
tattered picture album, an icon, a few flakes of lace — spread on
newspapers. Big foreign cars rolled through the streets, past the
belching street-cars and the frozen bread queues, carrying un-
shaven factory directors and uniformed officials. In the Grand
Hotel an orchestra played threadbare jazz tunes over and over
again raspingly, like a horned gramophone with only two or three
worn records.

“This is the coldest winter I remember,” an old-timer among
the foreigners said, sipping Caucasian wine in the high marble-
walled dining room.

“And the toughest,” another confirmed. “It’s like the last
months under military communism, only then we were reaching
the end of a nightmare, now we seem to be at the beginning of
one.”

“They say that the Red Army’s being used again to collect
grain,” a third added, as though it were all part of the inclemency

178 hallelujah!

o£ the weather. “A German technician just back from Rostov says
they’re shooting kulaks right and left around there.”

“Yeah, and it’s only the start, boys. The Bolos are in an ugly
temper, and there’s gonna be no half measures. I’ve been watch-
ing them since 1921, and I know whereof I speak. The Trotskyists
have gotten Stalin’s goat, he’ll show them he can out-left the
Lefts. They say — ”

Gruesome were the things “they said,” and some were true and
more were apocryphal. But even the inventions were true in that
they were products of the uncertainty and the panic.

Declassed and other undesirable people were being thrown out
of their rooms to make way for proletarians. People “disappeared”
more frequently from the offices where you were accustomed to
finding them. “Comrade So-and-So is sick,” you were told over
the telephone. “No, he is not expected back, he’ll be sick for a
long time” Mild-mannered little men suddenly began to boast,
after a drink or two of vodka, of how they had strangled White
Guards with their bare hands in the civil war days to save bullets
—the old intoxication of blood was being revived.

The synthetic “demands” that arise through the nation for pre-
cisely the things the Kremlin has already decided to do, provide
amusement to the cynical. The process is so transparently make-
believe that no one is fooled, yet the government persists in the
comedy year after year. It is a ritual of propitiation whenever
something unpalatable must be forced down the nation’s gullet.
There would be a sudden flood of resolutions, let us say, demand-
ing a new loan. The proletariat clamors for the privilege of contrib-
uting a month’s wages toward the “voluntary” purchase of loan
bonds; the resolutions are curiously alike in wording and most
unconvin cing . The government takes cognizance of this public
opinion and magnanimously consents to float another loan. In-
stantly posters and displays, though it must have taken months to
prepare them, blossom throughout the country. The bonds are
already printed and the details of the whole thing, which must
have taken months to work out, are ready. Some genius, in short,
has foreseen the popular “demands” and was ready for them.
Next year, and every year, the routine is repeated.

So now there arose a proletarian cry for bread cards. Peasants
were buying up the city’s bread and feeding it to their pigs and

LIFE IS RATIONED

179

;attle; bread at official prices was cheaper than fodder at market
prices. First in one city, then another, and soon throughout the
U.S.S.R., the synthetic wish for rations was met. Every manual
worker under the new dispensation was entitled to two pounds of
bread daily $ white collar or brain workers to one pound. Rela-
tively low prices were fixed for these rationed quantities, and prices
twice and later four or five times as high for bread bought with-
out ration coupons. In effect it was a method of supplying workers
at comparatively low prices. The lishentsi and those not belonging
to the trade unions for any other reason were not entitled to
rations.

A shudder of apprehension passed down the country’s spine.
Rationing had ugly connotations in the Russian mind. It recalled
the most tragic days of the war and the civil wars. In the twelfth
year of the revolutionary era, in the midst of the new boastful
slogans being raised by the Stalin regime, it seemed a depressing
omen. Young people who had grown to maturity in these twelve
years were reminded that the revolution was not something in
history text-books, but terribly immediate.

From that moment until the autumn of 1933 nearly five years
later, the food situation grew steadily worse. Difficult as 1929
may have been, it was to seem from the vantage point of 1932 or
1933 a time of plenty. As in a city besieged food becomes the one
absorbing subject, dominating all thought and all conversation,
even so in the Soviet Union of the Five Year Plan the search for
food, the struggle for sheer physical subsistence monopolized
men’s minds and drained their energies. National events and for-
eign affairs had a meaning for the mass of Russians only to the
extent that they might affect the food supplies: all things unrelated
to the stomach, the one gnawing reality, seemed of no consequence
except for the professional politicians. Men changed their trades,
their creeds, their friends in the hope of a little more sunflower
seed oil or tea or bread.

The outer world was made to see Russia as a beehive of enthu-
siastic activity, where men labored and sacrificed in a spirit of
fanatic self-abnegation. I did more than my share in building up
that idyllic picture. Yet I know that the Average Russian,’’ if
there is such a thing, was less interested in the billions and trillions

180 hallelujah!

of the plans than in his hope of finding another herring, another
pound of potatoes. I watched men and women map out intricate
campaigns of flattery and wire-pulling to obtain a little more milk
or a pat of butter for their infants. I saw them risk their careers
or put themselves in danger of exile to a concentration camp for
an extra ration.

The enthusiasm, or the ruthless will to achieve, was at the top.
Below was naked want and desperation. A population meek by
nature was made meeker by undernourishment, and therefore
more amenable to manipulation by its rulers. People who spend
every free moment looking for food have no time to mutiny or
even to ask questions. It is not true that people revolt when they
are hungry: revolt needs more strength than hungry men can
muster. The fear of hunger or the memory of it is a more effective
spur to protest than the debilitating fact itself. At any rate, I know
that the grumbling in Russia was bolder at moments when the
food situation eased up a bit.

Foreigners, too, were given the privilege of rations. The in-
flation of the Soviet currency, however, made them all affluent,
so that they could afford to feed themselves at non-ration prices.
The physical hardships involved in standing in line to buy— and
the total absence of some products — were their principal prob-
lems. Later the government solved these in part by organizing
for foreigners special shops where they could purchase within lib-
eral limits whatever the government had to sell, which was fre-
quently less than enough for a balanced diet. We had to hire an-
other “house worker,” the lanky, aging Vera Ivanovna, to give
all her time to corralling food supplies and helping Billy prepare
meals. In the old days this Vera Ivanovna had been cook in a
well-to-do family, with maids and scullions at her elbow, and she
resented her decline more bitterly than any multimillionaire re-
duced to penury. Her temperamental fits were worthy of a prima
donna.

The food shortage was seriously aggravated by the Kremlin’s
decision to meet foreign trade obligations with food exports. As
conditions became steadily worse, the knowledge that their gov-
ernment was exporting food became perhaps the deepest of the
silent grievances of the Soviet people.

It was with rationing that the lush verdure of half-illicit humor

LIFE IS RATIONED

1 8 1

on the theme of food sprang up everywhere. I could fill a thick
volume with the tragic “jokes” that multiplied and spread 3 new
ones and variations on old ones arose nearly every day and swept
the country. “Why is ours the most cultured country in the
world?” a popular riddle asked, to which the proper answer was:
“Because nearly everybody has at least one book and treasures it
— the food book.” “Why has Trotsky been sent abroad?” another
asked. “Because we export all our most necessary products.”
“Papa,” a little boy was represented as asking, “why don’t Jews
eat ham?” At which father turned angrily on his son. “And we
Russians,” he said bitterly, “do we eat ham?” Another anecdote
told of a conference which discussed ways and means of fighting
prostitution. The question arose as to which of the government
departments should be entrusted with the task. Some favored the
Commissariat of Health, others the Commissariat of Education.
But the wisest among them said: “And I, comrades, suggest that
we entrust prostitution to the Commissariat of Trade. Then it is
sure to disappear. That’s what has happened to everything else it
manages — bread, sugar, tea, milk. ...” A former Nepman is asked
how he feels. “Oh, just like a moth,” he sighs, and explains that
he has already eaten his wife’s coat (by selling it through a com-
mission shop, of course) and is now eating his own fur collar.
Endlessly these “anecdotes” were hatched and elaborated.

It was no laughing matter. None of the subjects of political
humor are in themselves funny. It is the humor begotten of pain.
I saw the tremulous excitement that touched a Russian family
when some member of it brought home a decaying herring or a
verminous bit of meat. A reputable Russian actor came to me
shamefacedly, with tears in his eyes, to beg a little cereal and a
bit of sugar for his sick baby. Women offered their bodies in the
hope of a real meal. A woman visiting the home of a General
Electric engineer saw white bread, touched it incredulously, and
burst into hysterical weeping. I telephoned half a dozen legations
to find a lemon for a Russian friend whose dying wife needed it.
The advantages of foreigners, with their greater opportunities for
buying edibles and their right to import some, made them a class
apart, as far above the mass of their neighbors as J. P. Morgan
might be above a workman on relief. Conversation in Russia might
begin anywhere, in the clouds of philosophy or art, but it spiraled

1 82 hallelujah!

down always and inevitably to food. I saw all work in offices
paralyzed when someone mentioned that an article of food could
be bought at a certain market or cooperative store.

There was enough to eat in the better hotels, it is true, but at
prices far beyond the reach of any but a few privileged officials or
successful embezzlers. A meal at the Grand Hotel might cost the
equivalent of a factory worker's income for a week. Tourists and
visiting delegations, unless they were uncommonly stupid, could
not be totally unaware of the food shortages. There were the
queues, the empty shelves in shops, the haggard faces. But they
ate amply themselves and saw workers and officials eating in the
favored factories. There were also individuals, thousands of them,
who did not know deprivation personally, either because they were
earning large amounts or had enough political pull to obtain neces-
sities denied to others. For the masses these lucky exceptions only
underlined their routine miseries.

Americans who had worked with the American Relief Adminis-
tration in the Volga famine areas have told me how guilty and
bestial they sometimes felt to be hiccupping with satiety when
they knew that people were dying of hunger beyond their doors.
In the midst of a robust mouthful, a woman told me, she suddenly
recalled the starved little faces and swollen bellies of children
she had seen half an hour before, and it made her sick with nausea.

A little of this ordeal was ours, the shame of filling one’s belly
three times a day when all around was shortage. Not famine, but
the shortage that causes men’s bodies and minds and spirits to
sag — the shortage that makes the stomach the core of existence,
the center of every waking and dreaming thought — the shortage
that makes all other human values, art, beauty, ideals, philosophies,
an empty mockery.

XI. Social Slag

WITH open, wakeful, horrified eyes I saw a nightmare. Five
floors crowded with human wreckage: an unholy offal heap of
some seventeen hundred cripples, beggars, old prostitutes, thieves
and cutthroats, drug addicts, sex perverts — men, women and chil-
dren in the lowermost depths of poverty. For months the loath-
some memory haunted me and colored my thoughts. When I
described my visit in a restrained dispatch, I inserted and under-
scored these sentences:

The house is a heritage of the days of tsardom, and must not be
held against the Soviet regime. The derelicts to whose use it is dedicated
are of the type whom no change in government or in economic struc-
ture can possibly help — the dregs of the teeming city population.

This was reassurance not so much for the readers as for myself.
In the twelfth year of the Soviet revolution I had found the
“night’s lodging” depicted by Maxim Gorky in his Lower Deaths
not merely intact but more terrible in its reality than any stage
director had managed to make it. As with everything else that
distressed me, I discounted it as a left-over from the past, thus
exonerating the revolution.

Under the surface of every great city there is another sub-
merged city, a life far out of sight which few natives and no
strangers can even guess at. The nightmare that I stumbled across
was a microcosm of that slimy nether life. Through the accident
of a casual acquaintance I was led to the Dom Nochlyega: the
“House for a Night’s Lodging,” still known to the denizens of
Moscow’s lowest strata as the “Yermakovka,” after the million-
aire Yermakov who built it long before the revolution. There
were six such institutions at this time in Moscow, together accom-
modating about four thousand lodgers. This acquaintance, who
had traveled much in his day through Europe and the Americas,
was singing the praises of Western culture and civilization.

183

184 hallelujah!

“Culture, civilization,” I bristled. “What about the misery and
poverty and crime that it breeds? Do you know the East Side of
New York or London’s Whitechapel, the slums and hell-holes
of that civilization? You judge by the suave surfaces.”

“And here, under the Soviets?” he smiled.

“I admit the surfaces here are far from pretty. But that’s be-
cause the veneer has been ripped off, and we are seeing things as
they really are. Here there is no pretense and no concealment.
The sores are visible to the naked eye and they will be cured.”

“So you think it’s all on the surface, do you? You think you
have seen the worst of it? Well, my young friend, maybe I can
show you that even what you see here is only a veneer. Down
below life is putrescent, worse than anything London or Paris or
New York conceals.”

How he managed it I do not know, but several nights later
he led me to the Yermakovka. No other foreigners, as far as I
know, had been there and certainly no American correspondent
until then had been through it. I knew flop-houses on the Bowery,
wretched tenements, and steerage holes. I started for the Yerma-
kovka expecting misery but convinced that it would be only a
Russian variation on the ancient world-wide theme. What I found,
however, was so much more loathsome than anything I had ever
seen with my own eyes that it seemed of a wholly different order
of horror.

We went through chamber after chamber and floor after floor,
accompanied by armed guards, to look at a lengthening exhibition
of broken and degraded humanity. These “night’s lodgings” are
the refuge of the homeless, the helpless, and the criminal who
can beg or steal the fifteen kopeks to pay for a bed. It is the last
refuge, too, of those who shun the law and their fellow-men. It
is the one place where they need not show documents or even give
their names.

The corridors were wet and slippery with grime and filled with
an awful stench. Everywhere were diseased and perverted faces
or blank faces emptied of all human meaning and feeling. In the
women’s section I saw haggard creatures in rags sprawled half
nude on their cots, too hopeless and apathetic to notice our intru-
sion $ and younger women, with sick and leering faces, who threw
obscene words at us. There were some 350 women in the house

SOCIAL SLAG

185

that night, about a dozen o£ them with infants at their breasts or
crawling among the rags. In the men’s section there were special
rooms to which were assigned cripples, criminals, drug fiends, and
so on. While no questions were asked, the administration was
familiar with the types and separated as far as it could those driven
to the lodging by poverty from those who made up the diseased
and criminal elements.

The large barracks set aside for the deformed was something
out of a Dantesque imagination. A huge roomful of men without
arms, without legs, paralytics, blind men, hunchbacks lying on
hard beds in the grotesque postures necessitated by their deformi-
ties, many of them groaning and writhing. A roomful of distorted
bodies, faces and minds. In the wing for criminal elements our
arrival was resented and foul names were yelled in our direction.
In one room the guard drew his revolver to silence the growling.
Hundreds of the inmates seemed mere boys.

Back in the office of the administration I asked an official who
these creatures were, whence they came, and where they would
end. His answers were far from explicit. Every evening beginning
at six the line of applicants for a night’s lodging formed in the
yard of the Yermakovka and until midnight the city’s homeless
kept coming. Often they failed to get admission after hours of
waiting.

“There has been such an influx of peasants fleeing their vil-
lages,” he said, “that every night now we turn away from three
to five hundred. It’s sad but it can’t be helped. We can only guess
who these people are. Some are beggars: you see them on the
Moscow streets. Some are whores too old or ugly to find custom-
ers. Others are hiding from the police. But a large number are
just poverty-stricken people without a roof over their heads. We
have many here who come with recommendations from their trade
unions. We let them stay for two weeks or even more. All the
rest are turned out every morning. We can’t guarantee that they
will find their bed when they return at night — after all, this isn’t
a hotel!”

“They say,” another official volunteered, “that members of the
old aristocracy have been reduced to living in the Yermakovka,
but we have no way of telling. There’s a very old woman in one
of the rooms tonight — she comes here often — who is said to have

1 86 hallelujah!

owned a great estate in the Crimea, but I accept these stories with
a grain o£ salt.”

New lodging houses were being built, they said, and in the
next year or two these plague spots would perhaps be eliminated.
Meanwhile even a bed in the Yermakovka is better than none,
comrade, isn’t it?

“We try to clean the place, but what’s the use? It’s a foul
stable again as soon as the mob comes at night. But we have insti-
tuted a medical department in the basement. While we don’t force
anybody to get treatment, we let them know that they can get it.
Mostly mothers and babies use the clinic.”

I inspected the clinic, then fled from the place. I could not con-
tain myself and mentioned the visit to a communist acquaintance.

“The dregs of the capitalist civilization that we’re eradicating,”
he said, untouched. “It’s just a lot of nonsense putting them up
in night’s lodgings of any kind. They should be drowned and
forgotten. We are starting from scratch and don’t have to drag
along the past.”

2

When I cabled detailed accounts of the trial of anti-Semites
from Minsk, my London editor, Webb Miller, unkindly but not
untruthfully described them as “alibi” for the expense account.
The trial was, in fact, an excuse for a close-up of this town. My
curiosity had deep roots. For some centuries before its transfer to
America, my family had lived in that region, and members of it
in Minsk proper. The town is the first railroad station beyond the
frontier point when one enters Russia through Poland, and I had
promised myself a more detailed view. Like all things heard or
glimpsed in early childhood, the name had overtones of glamor
for me, however commonplace it might sound to others.

I use the past tense advisedly: one good look at the bedraggled
capital of White Russia wiped out forever the faintest suggestion
of glamor. Poverty and ignorance, both ancient and deeply in-
crusted, were written indelibly on the old town and its environs.
Streets and houses were more woebegone, droshkies more rickety
and direputable-looking, even the horses seemed hungrier and
wearier than in any other city I had as yet seen. The pulse of
new construction that disturbed the sluggishness of other Soviet

SOCIAL SLAG I 87

towns seemed absent in Minsk, a slow-moving, and seemingly
hopeless place. Its major industry, from the looks of it, was
photography — probably explained by the fact that nearly every-
body in the former Jewish “pale” has relatives in America who
must be reminded with portraits of folks in the old country. The
principal streets were overrun with holes-in-the-wall calling them-
selves modestly Rembrandt, Rubens, Michelangelo, or Repine
photograph studios. Shop windows specialized in fly-specks and
portraits of the Soviet deities. The ill-smelling side-streets lined
with decrepit houses were so reminiscent of scenes remembered
from the tales by Sholom Aleichim and Mendele Maikhar Sforim
that they surely could not have changed much in the intervening
generations. A scant twenty-five miles from the Polish border and
therefore destined to be among the first victims in the event of
war, Minsk suffers neglect. Moscow’s sensible policy is to concen-
trate new industries in less vulnerable geographical areas.

The city having been viewed and discounted in short order, the
trial became the sole local interest for me after all. Three young
rowdies were accused of anti-Semitic outrages against a twenty-
year-old Jewish girl, Druzye Barshai, in the glass factory where
they all worked j another woman worker, a factory official and
two policemen were brought to trial with these three for their
failure to protect the girl. Neither the stupid pranks nor the vic-
tim in themselves merited national attention, but the episode was
singled out for the limelight because of its very pettiness. It served
as a sample of routine, habitual Jew-baiting in the government’s
unending fight against Russia’s heritage of racial hatreds.

The Minsk exhibition trial took place in the auditorium of the
Railroad Workers Club, decorated with posters, pictures, and red
bunting, and crowded to suffocation by a local population whose
life is not often enlivened by events of national importance. About
half the inhabitants of Minsk are Jews, the rest being White Rus-
sians, Poles and Great Russians. The life of the city — its Soviets,
police stations, courts, street signs and even lavatory signs — is con-
ducted in four languages: a disconcertingly literal application of
the principle of racial equality.

The trial, however, was not attuned to local needs. The c£ Bar-
shai affair” became a kind of banner in the campaign against anti-
Semitism. What would normally have amounted to a police court

1 88 hallelujah!

case of hooliganism was converted into a charge of counter-revo-
lution, for which the extreme penalty is death. No one seriously
expected this penalty to be invoked, but its mere shadow threw
the proceedings into sharper relief. Leading journalists from all
over the country attended the trial and my own presence as the
only foreign representative (aside from correspondents for Ameri-
can Jewish publications) was played up by the Soviet press as proof
of international interest.

Despite earnest efforts to eradicate it, anti-Semitism still flour-
ished in Russia. Traditionally the scapegoats for hardship and
disaster, the Jews were blamed by the more ignorant sectors of
the population for the deeds of the Soviet regime and the mis-
deeds of anti-Soviet elements $ they were hated as Nepmen and
as the liquidators of Nepmen. Prejudice has no need for logic.
On food queues I heard the Jews cursed by simple suffering
people, though the Jews were on the queues with them. Even
within the Communist Party the disease was prevalent: a party
of millions inevitably reflects the superstitions and prejudices of
the population from which it is drawn. The great number of com-
munists expelled from membership for anti-Semitism is sufficient
indication of its spread in the ruling minority 5 the dilution of the
Party in recent years by drawing in hordes of factory workers had
operated to deepen its anti- Jewish streak.

To the most ignorant layers of the Soviet population, Lenin is
still a Jew and his regime is still a Jewish regime. Occasionally
one hears Russians assert, without realizing the irony of their re-
mark, that they affrove of the Jewish government. The Kremlin
is keenly aware that anti-Semitism is frequently an indirect ex-
pression of anti-communism and must be combated as such.

The triviality of the actual incidents involved and the unpre-
possessing personality of Druzye Barshai took the edge off the
exhibition. The girl was a creature of stunted mind and body,
illiterate and uncommonly ugly, the sort of unfortunate doomed
to be the victim of backward ruffians whatever her race might be.
The young hooligans had tripped her up, played obscene tricks
on her, and in general made her bleak life more miserable. They
were now completely bewildered that their “fun” should have
become an affair of world-wide importance dignified by the charge
of counter-revolution.

SOCIAL SLAG

189

They blinked stupidly in the flaring arclights and even in the
improvised courtroom kept referring to Jews in insulting words
— the only names for Jews that they knew. Though they were
pitifully contrite and insisted that they really had nothing against
the zhidy (the traditional foul designation for the race by Jew-
baiters in Russia), it was evident that they were unconvinced that
their behavior was criminal.

The factory heads and the policemen, among them communists,
who had not moved a finger to help the Barshai girl and had
chuckled at the obscenities of her tormentors, were the real culprits.
The prosecution directed its fire against them even more than
against the illiterate rowdies. Sentences ranging from six months
to three years were imposed on all the accused. The factory offi-
cials no doubt paid for their complacency by the loss of their posts
and their Party membership.

3

At the Amo automobile works on the outskirts of Moscow, sev-
eral hundred men and women were gathered in a large room,
listening to a long and tedious speech. Their boredom was too
evident. Hungry glances were cast at a counter against one wall
heavily laden with sandwiches: red caviar, cheese, and other rare
delicacies. When I entered and took a seat in the rear, the speaker
was discussing Geneva, disarmament and imperialism. From world
politics he descended by stages to national affairs and finally to
the Amo plant and its duty to produce more and better motor cars.

“It is Comrade So-and-So, of the Moscow Committee of the
Party, an important communist,” my companion whispered.

He was followed by other speakers, evidently communists work-
ing in the plant. All of them lectured the audience like school
teachers lecturing a class of retarded pupils who needed the same
thought repeated endlessly. The classroom effect was given addi-
tional color by an “examination” which one of the speakers con-
ducted.

“Let us see whether our department has learned its political
A B C,” he said. “In the great task of building socialism, all work-
ers must be politically conscious, vigilantly on guard against ene-

190 hallelujah!

mies at home and abroad. Why is Right opportunism the greatest
danger at this stage o£ the revolution ? 57

Silence greeted the question.

“Don’t be bashful, citizens and comrades , 55 the speaker urged.
“Who can answer the question ? 55

Another silence, more urging by “teacher , 55 then a bright pupil
ventured an answer, and after him half a dozen others stood up
and stammered things half-remembered from recent speeches and
editorials. One of them got his answer sadly garbled, so that it
ended in gibberish and evoked laughter. The men at the red-
draped table in front held a whispered consultation, and the
speaker resumed:

“The correct answer, citizens, is the one given by Comrade
Ivanov. Yes, Right opportunism is the chief danger because it
is the ideology of kulaks, Nepmen, and disguised Trotskyists.
Comrade Ivanov receives this prize for his answer . 55

A framed lithograph portrait of Stalin was passed overhead to
Ivanov, and everybody applauded.

Other questions and answers followed, with books, pictures, a
plaster bust of Lenin awarded to the best parrots. Then there was
an adjournment while sandwiches were distributed. Refreshed, the
meeting was resumed.

It was an “election 55 to the district Soviet by the workers of
one department of the factory. “One hundred percent of the
voters took part , 55 the press would announce the next day.

A list of names was read by the presiding functionary. It was
the “ticket 55 drawn up by the communist nucleus in the depart-
ment, and it contained many names of non-communists. The dis-
cussion was brief and almost entirely laudatory. Two or three
workers expressed their hope that the Soviet delegates would do
something about improving the service in the factory buffet. Finally
those in favor of the list were asked to raise their hands. Nobody
was opposed.

It was my first view of an “election . 55 The following day I
saw another, in a workers 5 club. Miscellaneous citizens not at-
tached to large factories or institutions, among them servant girls,
free-lance writers, janitors, were electing their delegates. I heard
approximately the same speeches and even more perfunctory dis-
cussions of the candidates.

SOCIAL SLAG

191

I attended dozens of these meetings that year and in subsequent
years. Sometimes the discussions were more spirited. Several ob-
jections were raised to candidates on the ground that they drank
too much or did not devote enough time to social activities. But
not once did anyone even by implication raise a fundamental ques-
tion of larger policy. No one pretended that the electors were
deciding anything ; at best they were selecting the instruments for
putting into effect decisions already made in mysterious upper
regions. Whatever these election meetings might be worth as a
school for drumming in the ideas of the Kremlin, they were empty
farce considered from any other point of view.

4

Any number of Russians might bite any number of Russian
dogs — perhaps they do — without winning a line in the Soviet
papers. Unless their carnivorous tastes carried some political im-
plications they would not be news to a Soviet editor. Events with-
out a social purpose, the thousand and one hilarious and calamitous
accidents that befall mortal man, rarely if ever find space in the
Russian press. Ordinary crime, low-down homicide or robbery
without social pretensions — crime for crime’s sake, as it were — is
simply snubbed. The rare exception to this rule, such as the re-
ports of the “Volga pirates,” therefore made a large impression
on the public mind.

Not that the Soviet press did the story justice, journalistically
speaking. As the scanty and colorless news dispatches trickled
through the more obscure columns of Moscow’s newspapers I
could not help thinking:

“What a holiday this tale of lusty butchery and blood-soaked
bravado would have provided for the American tabloids! A mil-
lion stenographers would have lost their hearts instantly to the
swaggering Kuznetsov reciting the details of his murders and
plundering with professional pride. How they would have envied
his beautiful mistress! — well, she would have been beautiful in
the tabloids.”

The girl was only twenty-three, her name was Voronina, which
is Russian for “carrion crow,” and she was the only female in a
bandit trust of over thirty strong. In prison she sang and danced

192 hallelujah!

to keep up the spirits of her paramour and maybe her own. The
gang had terrorized the Volga region for years, preying on indi-
viduals, banks, shops, and evading the G.P.U. until early in 1929.
Kuznetsov himself may have been boasting when he counted his
killings by the dozen, but fifteen of them at least he described
in convincing style, among them the murders of his own wife and
child and an uncle. He believed that murder begins at home.
He led piratical raids on Volga steamers.

“I never robbed the poor,” Kuznetsov explained. On the con-
trary, he helped the widows and orphans, including those whom
he personally turned into widows and orphans. The proletarian
preachments had not been wholly lost on him. He told many
stories of his gallantry and essential kind-heartedness. One of
these sticks in my memory:

He held up a droshky and robbed the passenger of a cash
payroll for his factory just drawn from the bank. The cab driver,
scared out of his wits, drove off in a panic, but Kuznetsov sent the
gang after him. When the trembling cabman was brought back,
the robber chieftain read him a lecture on fairness and considerate
conduct.

“You should be ashamed of yourself, running off in this cow-
ardly fashion,” he chided the man. “Why, you’re the only witness
of this robbery. Without you, how will this poor fellow prove
that he was really robbed? He would be accused of having dis-
posed of the money himself. You have to stick by your fellow-
men, and we’ll see to it that you do.”

Paper and pencil were found and the minutes of the robbery
were written out. The cabman signed it as witness and the docu-
ment was presented to the victim as a receipt for his payroll.

These humane gestures did not save Kuznetsov from the firing
squad. Ten years of imprisonment is the highest punishment under
Soviet law for any crime except counter-revolution. That simpli-
fies matters. Whenever the government prefers to dispose of a bad
customer it calls his crime counter-revolutionary $ organized brig-
andage usually comes under that head. A batch of his underlings
died with Kuznetsov and the girl friend received a long prison
sentence.

The kind of crime that did figure frequently in the press was
distinctly political in character, chiefly corruption in office. Scarcely

SOCIAL SLAG

*93

a week passed without a major scandal in some part of the coun-
try: diversion of official funds for private orgies, the abuse of
bureaucratic power to terrorize entire towns, the entrenchment of
criminal elements in control of the Party apparatus in various cities
and provinces. The misuse of their official authority to force
women employees into concubinage — often “mass rape” of women
in a spirit of degenerate fun — was especially in vogue.

The foremost leaders in Moscow itself were rarely touched by
the breath of scandal,* but elsewhere depravity in high places was
all too common. The honey-pots of power draw insects under any
system. The vast number of these parasites exposed by the central
authorities, and duly reported in the press, left no doubt that many
more were still undisclosed. As long as “elections” are an empty
formality and secret arrests, exiles and shootings leave the indi-
vidual citizen subject to intimidation, the temptation to misuse
power remains almost insuperable.

“Bureaucratism” is the name given by the Bolsheviks them-
selves to the system which breeds such corruption. They are in-
cessantly announcing campaigns to wipe out the evil. It flourishes
notwithstanding. The campaigns against bureaucratism themselves
assume a bureaucratic character, tangled in red tape, favoritism,
espionage, fears, and grudges.

Shocking details of demoralization in the higher reaches of
Moscow trade-unions — in the shadow of the Kremlin itself! — were
published in January, 1929. Leading officials of the Moscow sec-
tion of the Trade Union of Construction Workers had formed a
fraternity calling itself “Kabuki.” Its object was debauchery in
the grand manner, using union funds, and intimidated women
employees for the purpose. Drunkenness, embezzlement, sale of
favors were among the numerous charges made against the “Ka-
buki” bravos by the Control Commission of the Party. The details
of the Saturnalias were too foul for publication; the Russian
imagination is fertile.

In the important proletarian region of Smolensk and its en-
virons, the party earlier had uncovered rottenness that makes

* In 1937 Henry Yagoda, after his dismissal as head of the G.P.U., was
accused of having embezzled state funds; if the charges were true, it means
that the corruption described here had spread to the very top in the next few
years.

194 hallelujah!

Tammany Hall seem puerile by comparison. The communist
heads of the local Central Executive Committee of the Soviets
and of the Smolensk Party Committee were busy with orgiastic
parties while the local police fraternized and shared loot with the
local bandits 5 while factory directors exacted payment in natura
from women workers under threat of dismissal from their jobs;
while tax collectors and financial chiefs feathered their own nests
with public funds. I take the word of Pravda for these facts. The
central government did a thorough job of house-cleaning once it
became aware of the situation; a number of the communists paid
with their lives; but that neither explained nor destroyed the
swamps that breed such corruption.

Then there was the astounding tale of Veli Ibrahimov, chair-
man of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of the
Tartar region in Crimea. An old-fashioned brigand chieftain, he
lorded it over his domain in the name of Marx until detected by
Moscow and liquidated. The list of crimes for which he and his
band, “communists” all, were shot included cold-blooded murder
of political enemies.

Analogous decay was uncovered in Irkutsk, in Artemovsk, in
dozens of cities. Of communist leaders arrested in Sochi, a lovely
garden spot on the Caucasian riviera, Pravda was able to write:
“Their orgies usually ended in the mass rape of a woman. The
girls of the Communist Youth organization were commanded to
come at night to the secretary of the district committee of the
Party. If anyone of them refused, she lost her job.” The Soviet
journalist Mikhail Koltzov was able to report out of Syr Darya
in Turkestan, following the clean-up of a corrupt Party leadership:

In general it became clear that the local committees, the Soviet
authorities and the Party cells of this region contained a large number
of sneaks, authentic thugs, genuine thieves, and highway robbers, and
that the Party was obliged to prepare for the Soviet elections with the
help of such human material.

I know that these perversions — and I could cite dozens more
from the official press accounts — were in no sense typical of Soviet
political life. They were merely extreme symptoms of the disease
of bureaucratism. The average Soviet official, I am still convinced,
is more virtuous and conscientious than the average capitalist offi-

SOCIAL SLAG

195

cial. But there are millions more of them in a “monolithic” state.
The departures from the average — absolutely, not relatively — are
therefore more numerous. Milder manifestations of the disease
were visible in every office, factory and institution.

The Soviet regime has never minimized the extent and serious-
ness of bureaucratic depredations. But the Kremlin stops short at
that point. It cannot follow the diagnosis to its ultimate implica-
tions, because the root of the disease is in the prevalent hierarchy
of power. Absolutism at the top implies hundreds of thousands,
even millions, of large and small autocrats in a state that mo-
nopolizes all means of life and expression, work and pleasure, re-
wards and punishments. A centralized autocratic rule must func-
tion through a human machine of delegated authority, a pyramid
of graded officialdom, each layer subservient to those above and
overbearing to those below. Unless there are brakes of genuinely
democratic control and the corrective of a hard-and-fast legality
to which everyone, even the anointed of the Lord, are subjected,
the machine of power becomes an engine of oppression. Where
there is only one employer, namely, the state, meekness is the first
law of economic survival. Where the same group of officials wields
the terrible powers of secret arrests and punishments, disfranchise-
ment, hiring and firing, assignment of ration categories and living
space — only an imbecile or someone with a perverted taste for
martyrdom will fail to kow-tow to them.

When dishonesty assumes the proportions of a pervasive na-
tional phenomenon it is sheer nonsense to set it down to “ill will”
or “hostility of class enemies” or some other catch-phrase. There
were men of ill will and there were hostile class enemies, but the
conditions which put them in positions of leadership were not of
their making. Those conditions were the direct result of the sup-
pression of every vestige of democratic expression in the Party
organizations, in the factories, and in Soviet life generally. ^

These, however, were conclusions taking shape, as yet, in the
remoter regions of my mind. Not only in my dispatches but in
my conscious views I discounted the engulfing corruption— drove
it out of my range of vision where possible— to safeguard my
vision of the socialist Fatherland.

XII. The Great “Break”

THE mass of the population was caught between its fear and its
despair, bodied forth in food queues, rations, repeated cleansings,
waves of arrests, new hordes of disfranchised, coercive loans, new
restrictions on religious organization, more stringent requisitioning
of farm products.

But a minority was galvanized into a fierce enthusiasm: fanatic,
self-sacrificial and pitiless, magnificent in its sheer will to carry
on. It was the inspired minority, with the whole arsenal of a
nation’s means of propaganda and instruments of terror at its
disposal, that spoke and acted for the whole country. The only
voice that could be raised above a whisper or a smothered groan
was the voice of this minority. It now filled the Russian land and
echoed through the nations of the world, until it seemed even to
the Kremlin’s enemies the authentic voice of the whole country.

That enthusiasm was deep and genuine ; only the pretense that
it represented the Soviet masses, or even the Soviet proletarians,
was false. The voice was authentic, but it was magnified through
the loud-speakers of the Kremlin’s propaganda. Whatever doubts
there may be about the measure of fulfillment of the Piatiletka
(Five Year Plan), there are none about the overwhelming suc-
cess of the world-wide ballyhoo around it. High-minded capitalist
investigators viewed the Soviet economic landscape through veils
of shimmering statistics and pronounced it perfect. Even breeders
of journalistic canards about the Soviet Union in neighboring capi-
tals came to accept as literal truths the high-flown metaphors about
crowding a century of progress into five short years, new industries
blossoming on the Russian steppes, an epochal experiment, etc.

I did more than my share in fortifying those metaphors in the
world’s imagination. Few foreigners in Moscow outdid the United
Press man in the glorification of the new socialist objectives. “How
the government proposes in the short space of five years to drag

196

THE GREAT “BREAK.” I 97

a backward agrarian country into the front ranks of industrialized
European nations” was the theme song of my daily dispatches.

I viewed successes in all their splendid immediacy, but regarded
attendant confusions and brutalities through half-closed eyes from
the vantage point of future history. It’s a neat and solacing trick
of perspective, practiced expertly on every page of the books sing-
ing hymns to Soviet industrialization. You look at the new fac-
tories, the collectivized acreage, the figures for tractor building in
close-up in the here and now. Then you step back a few gener-
ations or centuries and look at the human costs of these achieve-
ments through the telescope of posterity 3 naturally they seem
small and unimportant at that distance.

I was intimately aware of the sullen indifference and stifled re-
sentments of the mass, but I yielded my emotions to the enthu-
siastic minority. Hardships and routine cruelties became “sacri-
fices” and Casualties” in a war for socialism. Every present-tense
difficulty that I was obliged to report I proceeded to dwarf by
posing it against a great future-tense vision. As soon as any vast
undertaking can be translated into a “campaign” with fighting
“fronts” and “battles” and “shock troops” and “enemies,” its gen-
erals are relieved of every obligation of restraint and humaneness:
whether it be a campaign for the supremacy of the Aryan race or
the establishment of collectivization. A mistake costing a million
lives and subjecting a nation to untold miseries becomes a “tac-
tical error” to be disposed of in a neat war communique. Garden
variety tyranny is rationalized as “military discipline” and the
obscenest perversions of justice pass muster as “courts-martial.”

It was in an exalted mood, in any case, that I accepted the new
period in its first stages. Socialism in one mad leap ! I saw its daring
but disregarded the madness. Hundreds of thousands of Russians
similarly found the new spirit of military regimentation, the focus-
ing of the nation’s energy on clear-cut goals, the “scientific” gen-
eralship that reckoned not costs, acceptable. Their flagging faith in
socialism in their own time was revived. The idealism of youth
and its hunger for adventurous action found an outlet.

To comprehend this new epoch, the “Iron Age,” one must take
cognizance of both the inert, sullen millions and the exalted, driv-
ing thousands. A charge of dynamite may be negligible in size by
contrast with the mountainside into which it is injected, but it

igS hallelujah!

explodes that mass. The history of the next five years is gibberish
without an understanding of the explosive energy in the minority
and the flaming faith in an all-socialist future that touched off the
fuse.

Young communists who had reached maturity in the last eight
years and knew the glorious legends of the civil war period largely
from hearsay now thrilled at the new opportunity for deeds of
daring. Many heartsore old Bolsheviks sadly resigned to the de-
feat of their earlier hopes, and grieving over the humiliation of
Lenin’s old comrades, suddenly awoke to a new zest in revolution.
What matter who led the revolutionary armies now that the fort-
resses of hated capitalism were being stormed! The few com-
munists isolated in hostile villages and the poorest peasants, having
watched their despised neighbors prosper, recognized an outlet
at last for their smoldering hatreds.

Thus a mobilization of revolutionary sentiment was effected.
Its banner was the Five Year Plan of National Reconstruction.
Its rallying cries were Socialism in one country,” “storming the
citadels of the bourgeoisie,” “to catch up with and outdistance
capitalist economy.” The natural human instinct to make a virtue
of necessity had its place in this mobilization. The politically more
conscious sector of the industrial proletariat gratefully rationalized
its burdens as temporary war measures. Communists who may
have been irked by the increasing centralization of their Party and
the snuffing out of internal rank-and-file democracy, now could
yield themselves in an ecstasy of supreme duty to an unavoidable
“military discipline.” Former Oppositionists could capitulate with-
out losing face. The time for discussion was over. It was a time
for action. A “monolithic,” totalitarian Party was now a necessity.

2

In April, a conference of Communist Party officials gave formal
sanction to Stalin’s ascendancy and Stalin’s decision for a furious
drive to the Left. Two versions of the Five Year Plan had been
worked out by Gosplan (the State Planning Commission), a
“basic” normal plan and a more ambitious “optimal” plan. There
Was a difference of about 20% in the total production and con-
struction envisaged by these variants.

THE GREAT a BREAK.” I 99

The optimal plan was foreseen by its authors as possible only
under the most favorable conditions. They even specified four
of those unlikely conditions: the absence of any serious crop fail-
ures, broader commercial ties with the rest of the world, a sharp
improvement in the “qualitative indices” of Soviet industrial and
farming output, and relatively smaller expenditures for national
defense. Riding high on a wave of enthusiasm, the conference dis-
regarded these cautions and announced the more ambitious ver-
sion as its official goal.

In point of fact not one of those favorable conditions was to
eventualize. There were crop failures, serious war scares, failure
to raise quality, and staggering blows to foreign trade as a con-
sequence of the world depression. In the intoxication of optimism
whipped up by unrestrained propaganda, however, the plans in
the first year were revised upward, as we shall see, beyond all
logic instead of being switched back to the basic figures. A few
whose sense of proportion exceeded their sense of self-preservation
warned against such extravagance and found themselves con-
demned and punished as “Rights,” “defeatists,” and “capitalist
restorationists.”

The program of agrarian socialization was presented to the con-
ference by President Kalinin. In the light of what was to happen
at the end of the year, it is important to note that this program,
though it seemed extreme at the time, called for only 20% of the
peasantry to be socialized in the whole five-year period. In twelve
years of revolution, despite continuous propaganda for collectives
and all sorts of government subsidies, less than 2% of the peas-
antry had been collectivized. To induce 20% to join up in five
years seemed a sufficiently daring goal.

The Plan did not limit itself to industry and agriculture. It
embraced every department of the nation’s and the individual’s
life. Meticulously Gosplan detailed the great improvements in
education, housing, and feeding that would be brought to the
masses. It went to the length (later a pesky embarrassment) of
charting the higher standard of living. Because wages in terms of
money would be rapidly increased through higher productivity of
mechanized industry, and the purchasing power of the Soviet cur-
rency would appreciate 20%, the workers’ “real wages,” the Plan
promised, would rise by 66 %, and their cost of living would be

200 hallelujah!

lowered by 14%. They would eat 27.7% more meat, 72% more
egg s , 55.6% more dairy products. The promises to the peasantry
in this respect were more moderate but large enough to evoke a
vision of plenitude in the mind of an underfed poor peasant.

This phase of the Plan was lost and forgotten in the shuffle of
later boasts. But for the average Russian worker and peasant it
was this phase that counted most. They would have been less than
human had they not reacted in some measure to the flood of
promissory propaganda. I talked to dozens of factory and office
workers. Their immediate difficulties became a sort of investment
for the future. They would work hard, deny themselves every-
thing for a few years, then enter upon that ampler socialized life
projected in the Piatiletka . The five years were a prison sentence
or a term of compulsory military service beyond which lay free-
dom and comfort.

Party orators and press panegyrists, radio, theater, and cinema
forgot all caution in their optimistic encouragement of this naive
dream, this mirage in the desert of present hardships. The in-
auspicious beginnings, in rations and official pressures, became for
many of the sufferers a curious portent of glories to come, even
as his mundane travail is accepted by the religious martyr as a
guarantee of celestial bliss to come. Perhaps the Kremlin would
have been wiser to restrain its hosanna-singers who were sharp-
ening the cutting edge of disillusionment.

The Trotskyist Opposition press abroad claimed the Five Year
Plan as theirs in inspiration — the fruit of their long agitation —
though it condemned the extravagance and lack of proportion in
the Plan. Stalin’s retort was that the gigantic enterprise which he
sponsored in 1928-29 would have been premature and disastrous
in 1927. However that may be, national planning was not a stroke
of Stalinesque genius. It is inherent in the very theory of Marxist
socialism. Stalin’s role was the launching of a plan at the time
he did, and carrying it through with a ruthlessness, a defiance of
caution and logic, that turned the period into an “Iron Age.”

Nor is the industrialization of Russia as such a purely com-
munist inspiration to be credited to Stalin’s genius. One need only
look at the rest of the backward, semi-colonial East — Turkey,
Persia, China — to recognize the same urge to “Westernize,”

201

THE GREAT “BREAK”

mechanize, industrialize. Kemal Pasha uses almost the same lan-
guage as Stalin in mobilizing his new Turkey for its industrialized
future through a ten-year plan. When 1 interviewed the self-made
Shah of Persia some years later, he did not boast of the art treasures
of his nation but of the railroads and cement factories under con-
struction. In Russia that urge dates back to Peter the Great, whose
spirit and methods of catching up with the West were strikingly
prophetic of the Bolshevik effort. The fact is that industrial growth
in Russia just before the war compares favorably with the Five
Year Plan. In 1913 production amounted to 7,357,800,000 rubles
as against 6, 177,900,000 rubles the year before — an increase of
over 19% and therefore close to the average increase under the
Five Year Plan. Indeedj if one remembers that the rubles were
stable, the quality of the output vastly better, the over-advertised
triumphs of the Five Year Plan, considered merely as to quantity
and quality, lose some of their effulgence.

The real difference, of course, is in the social institutions which
emerged in the process rather than in industrialization itself. The
real yardstick of success for the Five Year Plan is therefore not
at all statistical. It is human. I tended to analyze the Plan in
terms of the bodies and minds of men, women and children,
rather than kilowatt-hours and acreage.

3

Stalin later described 1929 as the year of ferelom, the “break”
— the year of the great break with the past. His description seems
in retrospect even more true than it did at the time. Policies fore-
shadowed in the preceding year took concrete shape. What hap-
pened in the following years was but an extension and intensi-
fication of the attitudes fixed in 1929. The year stands as a sharp
frontier in time: a challenge to the past and a bid for the future.
The “line” of the ruling group acquired a disciplined hardness
such as it had not possessed before.

Isolated incidents in this rapid hardening of purpose and method
do not tell the whole story. In reading through my own and
other people’s running press reports for that year I find small evi-
dence of the ferelom , except by implication. The introduction of
rations, the announcement of a definitive Plan, the purgings in

202 hallelujah!

many branches of government economy and everyday life, the
new drive for collectivization, the bitter attacks on socialists and
other moderate labor elements abroad, were in themselves news
events of colossal importance. But individual episodes, each af-
fecting life in one or another department, obscured for the mo-
ment the spirit that ran through them all. Only by tracing the
common ingredient of these and a hundred other events to its
source do we come to the core of the period, the iron heart that
pumped a new spirit into everything with mechanical precision
and a mechanical disdain for logic or conscience. That spirit was
intolerant, cocksure, cruel — the ultimate cruelty of gods or demons
loosing deluges that cleanse and deluges that drown.

In its first years the revolution had been warmly human even
in its most brutal moments; I mean that it had been deeply and
consciously idealistic , aware of suffering and sensitive to mass emo-
tion. Now it became strangely impersonal and machine-like, im-
portant in its effects but as empty of real human content as a
thunderstorm or a flood. It was something decreed from above and
therefore inescapable but largely unrelated to the wishes or wills
of the people upon whom it operated for good or for ill. Small
groups helped the process along with a bigoted fury; other groups
fought against it with suicidal fury; the population as a whole
simply accepted it helplessly as a natural calamity.

The marvels of achievements against great odds and the horrors
of human wreckage and degradation alike were products of this
new impersonal spirit. I do not pretend to the Olympian aloofness
that measures the relative values of the achievements and the hor-
rors: I have found no common denominator to which they can
be reduced for such super-accountancy.

I know men and women without the ability to keep their own
household accounts in order who have no hesitancy in tackling the
godlike bookkeeping of human destiny that balances results against
costs. They assert that the price paid was quite reasonable or dirt
cheap or exorbitant, as the case may be. Their yardstick of meas-
urement is History. But it is a yardstick made of rubber, since
everything depends on whether they regard history as a span of
ten years or ten thousand.

The questions that pounded ever more insistently on the doors
of my conscience and my mind (no one knows where thought

THE GREAT a BREAK ?> 203

ends and feeling begins) were of a different order. Dare any
group of human beings, however wise and good they may count
themselves, arrogate to itself the divine role of meting out death
and suffering to the rest of mankind? The Biblical legend, crystal-
lizing countless ages of mortal suffering through mysterious agen-
cies beyond their control, tells of the divine anger that flooded a
world with death, sparing only Noah and the creatures in his
magic ark. It tells of Sodom and Gomorrah wiped out by divine
wrath. Most tribes and religions have similar fables. What I saw
was a handful of men in the Kremlin translating those fables
into fact, assuming for themselves the supernatural prerogative.

Without hesitation, they doomed millions to extinction and tens
of millions to inhuman wretchedness in the mystical delusion of
their divine mission. (They called it “historical” instead of “di-
vine.”) Could one grant them this prerogative, even in principle,
without justifying every self-righteous maniacal minority that
decides to enforce its visions on humanity by wars, inquisitions,
and dictatorships? Anyone who decided to torture and kill one
man or woman for the good of the victim’s unborn great-grand-
children would be adjudged insane. Is he any less insane when he
decides to torture and exterminate millions of men and women
for the good of their unborn posterity? Have only the unborn
generations a right to happiness, so that the anguish of the living
generation is a trifling investment for its great-grandchildren?

The logic of that “investment” turns mankind into a donkey
following the carrot hung before its nose but always out of reach.
The carrot of happiness for future generations is no more real
than the carrot of bliss in paradise dangled by religion ; both of
them may serve as justification for flogging the donkey. A thou-
sand things may snatch the theoretical happiness from the coming
generation 5 it may even have a different concept of happiness
than the group now brandishing “the sword of history.” Only
the anguish of the living generation is real and indubitable.

Sentimentality? All life is sentimental, if it is worth bothering
about at all. If human life has no intrinsic value, then revolutions
are senseless, ideals a mirage. Surely it is as sentimental to grow
excited over the bliss in store for unborn millions as over the
misery of existing millions.

If it is permissible to exterminate a sector of humanity for the

204 hallelujah!

sake of History, then there is no sensible reason for drawing the
line at five million or five hundred million. Drown them all, com-
rades, leaving only a he-Stalin and a she-Stalin in their mono-
lithic ark to start things over again from scratch!

I did not raise such issues in my cabled reports of the Soviet
scene, published in some twelve hundred newspapers the world
over. Imagine the consternation of an editor in Kalamazoo or
Bangkok if he were to find my speculations on life, death, and
history tacked on to a routine dispatch about “twenty-eight more
kulaks and speculators executed this week, bringing the known
total for the month to one hundred and fourteen.” Philosophical
doubts are not precisely spot news. The conventions of news re-
porting call for sharp-edged facts.

Behind the neat matter-of-fact dispatches, as cold as a coroner’s
report, were my private perplexities — so far behind that only a
few of my more perspicacious friends at home detected them.

The lineaments of the ferelcnn were outlined for me gradually
in its cumulative works. They will grow clearer as this narrative
proceeds. At this point it is necessary to summarize a few of its
more decisive principles of action, all of them related expressions
of the new dehumanized spirit that turned words like “idealism,”
“compassion,” “love” into insulting epithets. Those principles, im-
plicit or openly expressed, were:

First: The Communist Party became sacrosanct, its shifting
policies— the “Party line”— invested with a mystical validity be-
yond logic. This was a far throw from the earlier conception of
Party discipline. That discipline had been utilitarian, intended
to assure unity of action after a question had been discussed and
decided. Mental reservations, as long as they were not translated
into action, were not in themselves treacherous. Communists were
expected to sink their differences of opinion but not necessarily to
believe differently overnight. Now there were no longer dif-
ferences of view: there were only heresies. Decisions molded
through discussion gave way to inspired pronouncements from on
high. Reason gave way to faith.

Second: Stalin became the personification of that sanctity, the
inspired oracle and the repository of all wisdom. The word vozhd
— meaning not merely leader but the leader, with all the implica-

THE GREAT a BREAK >? 205

tions of the title duce in Italy or later Fuehrer in Germany —
was applied more frequently to Stalin. Soon “our voxhd” acquired
all the overtones of heavenly inspiration in the Soviet land that
il duce has in the fascist land. In the deification of Stalin the
logic of dictatorship was carried to its final level.

Third: The conviction that human life as such is valueless,
merely the raw stuff of history, took a firmer hold on the ruling
group. Larger purposes seemed to them to transcend mere flesh
and blood, so that any number of people might be sacrificed on
the altar of the true faith. A strange pride in the capacity to kill
for the cause developed and it called itself “Bolshevik ruthless-
ness” or “Leninist firmness.”

Fourth: “Social origin,” proper proletarian or poor-peasant
parentage, became the measure of personal value. A fierce pride
in respectable family descent, a fiercer persecution of “enemy”
blood grew into phobias. The same government that boasted of
its creches and kindergartens doomed hundreds of thousands of
children bora under the hammer-and-sickle to misery and death
because of their hereditary taint, barred them from schools, sent
them into exile with their parents. The sins of the fathers were
visited upon Soviet children and the stain of “original sin” was
declared ineradicable.

Fifth: Class war was proclaimed as the supreme method of
social advance, being artificially stimulated where it did not exist.
The Marxian analysis of society recognized class struggle as a
social fact arising because of inherent conflicts of economic inter-
ests. The Kremlin went a lot further. It proceeded to nurture hot-
house class struggles, as it were, if necessary inventing antagonisms
and enemies where there were none.

Sixth: In the non-Soviet world, revolutionary individuals or
organizations which did not accept Moscow’s leadership were
thereafter to be considered “social fascists” and more poisonous
even than the capitalists. In practice, this involved continuous
warfare against Social Democrats, moderate labor organizations,
communists of other than the Stalinist denominations — a warfare
which shattered the strength of labor and gave fascism unob-
structed right of way.

I do not mean that these principles were formulated anywhere
in this fashion, though they each found expression at one time

206 hallelujah!

or another in language more vigorous than I have used. They
were various aspects of the temper of the new period — irrecon-
cilable, hard-boiled, relentless, without a doubt or a regret to
relieve the harshness. The revolution once had warm blood in its
veins 3 it now preferred molten iron.

4

The great shaggy head of Karl Marx receded in the May Day
decorations in 1929, leaving Lenin and Stalin dominant, Russia
is a nation of icon- worshippers. Symbols have a potency beyond
anything in the West. The prominence given to different saints
and miracle-workers, living and dead, corresponds with mathe-
matical exactitude to their current influence. This May Day saw
Stalin lifted to a place of equality with Lenin in the outward sym-
bolism of the faith. On Red Square, on the buildings opposite
the Kremlin walls, huge faces of Lenin and Stalin were displayed.
Their gigantic full-length portraits were mounted on scaffolding
on Theatre Square, looming high above the Metropole Hotel
on one side and the Grand Hotel on the other. In the mass
demonstration, effigies of Stalin inscribed with his quotations and
thick flattery outnumbered all the other floats and placards.

Stalin — and industrialization. These were the two ideas from
this time forward. They were blended. They became interchange-
able. Stalin’s dark, fleshy visage came to mean smokestacks, oil
derricks, scaffolding, tractors, and each of these things came to
mean Stalin. The man Stalin who quarreled with enemies and
connived with allies, human and fallible, was swallowed by the
idea Stalin, at once fearsome and benevolent. Twelve years after
the dethronement of Nicholas the Last, Holy Russia had a Little
Father once more — too distant for personal love or hate, an in-
visible force to be flattered and propitiated. The very memory of
the man’s former insignificance now seemed too bizarre to be
credible. It was fitting that history should be frantically rewritten
to magnify his importance. One day he emerged as the real giant
of the civil war period, the next as the real force by Lenin’s side
in the tense “October days.” Others were pushed aside uncere-
moniously to make room for Stalin in the revised legend.

The focusing of all wisdom and all authority in one man at

THE GREAT “BREAK.”

207

the top was reflected in every department of Soviet life. More
dictatorial power was extended to individual directors in factories
and institutions. Even the pretense of rank-and-file control of the
ruling Party was forgotten. Everywhere respect for mass opinion
and notions of popular participation in factory management were
thrown overboard.

The process went under the brave label of “tightening disci-
pline” for the sake of efficiency— the standard excuse for dictator-
ship and authoritarian methods in all countries where democratic
notions are outlawed. Even as in Italy, foreign correspondents
whose personal liberties and privileges were left intact, ex claim ed
over the “splendid discipline.” They wrote home about the “amaz-
ing concentration of national energies,” and marveled at the “fine
faith that accepts without murmur decisions which mean new sacri-
fices and further tightening of the belt.” I was among those corre-
spondents. Only this I can say in extenuation: that in my case
these phrases were not cynical formulas of friendship for those in
power, dashed off between cocktails and dinner and forgotten.
They were earnest attempts to explain to myself more than to
others. I had need at least to conciliate my radical conscience.

Each day the screws were turned a little more tightly on the
intellectuals. Members of the Academy of Science, though their
special fields were as far from socioligy as medicine or botany,
had to prove their fealty to Marxism if they were to survive
not merely as academicians but as functioning scientists. Writers,
composers, painters, actors were given to understand unequivocally
that they could not remain above the Five Year Plan battle:
neutrality was tantamount to treachery and punished as such. The
homes of technicians and “intellectuals” were searched, they were
hauled to the G.P.U. for questioning on the slightest suspicion or
none.

Not only the declassed millions, but millions of fully enfran-
chised citizens, because they did not labor with their hands, were
thus treated as prisoners of war. And the soldiers themselves, the
workers at the benches, were submitted to a new and ever more
constricting “discipline.” By the end of May, the former head of
the trade-unions, Mikhail Tomsky, had “resigned.” Actually his
functions had been taken over by Shvernik, a Stalin underling,

208 hallelujah!

months before, and his expulsion in itself made little difference.
But it put a period on the old type of trade-unionism.

The unions became mere bureaus for registering and regiment-
ing the workers for the state, another whip in the hands of the
rulers. They became in effect “company unions,” whose primary
job was to help the “bosses/ 5 in this case the state. A strike (and
desperate, underfed and overworked proletarians occasionally re-
sorted to strikes despite all the risks) must now be directed against
the trade union no less than the administration.

I watched the tightening control from above with growing mis-
givings. Whatever the formal justification, it removed the workers
a few steps more from the dictatorship exercised in their name and
stripped them more thoroughly of the last possibility of defending
their personal rights as workers against the larger rights of the
organized and omnipotent state. The last pretense that the work-
ers owned the state was dropped — the state frankly owned the
workers.

New techniques for raising the productivity of the workers were
developed. “Shock brigades/ 5 or pace-setters, were organized in
every factory and office, every mine and construction job. The
brigadiers, or udarniki, worked harder, wasted less time and set an
example for their more indolent or less interested fellow-workers.
Patriotic devotion to the national cause was a large element in this
brigadiering, which enlisted the communists and the more socially
conscious workers.

But the motives were not unmixed. Udarmki became a class
apart on any job, compensated for their brigadiering by extra ra-
tions, priority in the distribution of deficit goods, first claim on
new housing space, and other privileges. Their children were the
first to receive milk or places in the schools. The best vacation
resorts were set aside for their use. Shops on Moscow’s principal
streets began to display luxuries like boots and textiles with placards
announcing “For sale to udarniki only!” They became a sort of
aristocracy within labor.

Like so much else which happened in Russia,, brigadiering has
been romanticized by superficial enthusiasts as a spontaneous ex-
pression of popular fervor. It was that in part. In even larger
part the udarniki themselves preferred to believe that duty rather

THE GREAT “BREAK.” 209

than the extra rations or pair of boots turned them into brigadiers.
But the official approval was not often shared by the workers out-
side the brigades. For the run-of-the-mill proletarian the wdarnik
was frequently someone who curried favor with the administration
and forced down wages per unit of production by setting new
standards of speed.

I recall a conversation with our friend H , a young woman

working at a sewing machine in a Moscow clothing factory.

“Well , 55 I asked her, “have you joined a brigade ? 55

“No, not me . 55

“Why not ? 55

“Oh, I work hard enough as it is for my bread and water. Be-
sides all the toe-lickers are becoming udarniki . I 5 ve got too much
pride to join . 55

It took a few months of increasing food shortage and clothes
shortage to humble her pride. She finally became an udarmk .
She had a new dress and a pair of vdinki > felt boots, to show for
it.

“Some of the people in my department pretend that it 5 s for the
Five Year Plan that they 5 re in the brigade. But they 5 re in it for
the vdinki like myself . 55

H may have underestimated the idealism of her fellow-

udarniki. Unquestionably the immense propaganda for industriali-
zation was having its effect in tapping deposits of unselfish social
emotion. That it did not suffice to stimulate the best efforts of
the workers may be judged from the fact that ultimately the
Kremlin had to appeal more directly to the motives of self-ag-
grandizement through old-fashioned goads to personal initiative
Like piece work, bonuses for better work and “docking 55 for in-
ferior work.

Another of the techniques for stimulating production introduced
it this time was “socialist competition . 55 Factories in the same in-
dustry, departments in a single factory, sometimes entire indus-
tries, challenged one another to contests in fulfilling production
blans. The press and factory bulletin boards gave the progress
)f such contests as much prominence as American papers give base-
ball scores. The winning side received banners and loving cups
md had to maintain its records or lose the trophy. Even poets
mdertook “socialist competition 55 in producing verses to inspire

2 I O HALLELUJAH !

the udarmki. Novels and plays appeared in which shock-brigadiers
were the heroes and socialist production contests, the plot and
counter-plot.

This intensification of labor, whatever its motives or its methods,
had a magnificent sweep. The sheer magnitude of the effort was
imposing. It was like a mobilization of an entire nation for war.
More so. War ordinarily leaves a large portion of the population
unaffected, carrying on its accustomed life of work and pleasure
in the old way. This Soviet mobilization left no one undisturbed.
Whether in terms of new tasks of labor, new persecutions, new
deprivations, life was altered fundamentally for everybody.

The calendar itself was wrenched out of its ancient moorings.
We reported it to the outside world melodramatically as “the
nationalization of Sunday,” and the atheists were indeed well
pleased with the innovation. By turning the Sabbath into a hum-
drum working day it made church going possible only by absenting
oneself from work, and abstention without good reasons acceptable
to the administration could mean discharge from one’s job. But
the Godless victory was a mere by-product of the reform. Actually
it amounted to the nationalization of all seven days of the week
for the Five Year Plan. The traditional pause, when an entire
nation simultaneously rests from its labors, was abolished. The
“uninterrupted work week” was introduced into one industry after
another, and finally into all Soviet undertakings. Every fifth day
was a “free day” for one-fifth of the employees only. The day of
rest was thus staggered, so that the wheels of labor never stopped
turning.

The change affected the quality of life under the hammer-and-
sickle more deeply than a mere statement of the fact indicates.
Mankind is habituated to dividing time, with a Sabbath to mark the
break. The day of repose, not for one man but for all, provides
a goal toward which the days of work can march, a counterpoint ol
holiday in the symphony of labor. All that was sacrificed for the
Plan and efficiency. Every day became like every other day, with
only three national holidays when the sense of total rest could be
recaptured. The individual had his “free day,” but it was like
laying off for twenty-four hours on a week-day, with none of the
heightened value that a general cessation brings. It did not cor-

21 I

THE GREAT “BREAK.”

respond, except accidentally, with the “free days” of his friends
or even his family. The color of life, already monotonous gray,
was made flatter. The psychology of embattled desperation fostered
by the new Kremlin policies seemed to reach its logical conclusion
in this merging of time into a treadmill of uninterrupted work.:
There are no holidays in the trenches.

XIII. Accent of Moscow

AT THE other end of Clean Ponds Boulevard there was a Red
Army barracks. Going to and from their weekly baths the sol-
diers marched, singing, under our windows. Sometimes in the
dawn hours we heard their voices dimly far off, then louder and
closer and suddenly thundering in our ears, the cobbled street
a drumhead for their heavy boots. Little Genie was soon singing
all the marching songs, though she understood scarcely a word
of them (which was just as well, the words are often ribald
enough). We could tell by the pace of their music whether the
warriors were going to or coming from their ablutions. Going,
their songs were slow and touched with melancholy. Returning,
they sang briskly, and their young voices glowed like their steamed
and parboiled faces. Billy learned to give a musical imitation of
the Red Army before and after steaming which remains a hilarious
family classic.

I have read tourist gurglings in which the singing of Soviet
soldiers was cited as proof of the happy mood of the Red Army.
Russian soldiers sang lustily, of course, long before the revolution.
Most of the tunes are still the same, though the words have been
brought into line ideologically. “Ekh, Dunya, my little Communist
Girl!” the chorus of one such song now exults. The adventures
of red-kerchiefed Dunya are earthy and well-spiced, for she is
the rhymed favorite of soldiers, sailors, commissars. She goes
through a gate and the whole army follows. She twists her thick
braids and there is a stampede of sailors. The rhymed couplets
beloved of the Russians now deal with Soviet themes as well as the
ancient plaints:

By radio we met and by radio we wed,

And by radio we got — a little baby Red.

Or:

I have no mom, I have no pop,

I was born in the gutter — a hen brought me up.

212

ACCENT OF MOSCOW

213

The chorus for these rhymes, flung to the Moscow skies by a
marching Red division, sounds like a challenge to capitalism in the
ears of keyed-up tourists. But the words are far from Marx, being
approximately:

Tea she drank and the samovar she lit;

The dishes she smashed and the cook threw a fit.

A soldiers 5 ditty that I liked especially recounts in marching meas-
ures a peasant mother’s farewell to her gawky son departing for
army service. The chorus ends on a note of affectionate maternal

* Without you the Bolsheviki would be lost . . .

There were also songs never before intoned by Russian sol-
diery. Workers’ revolutionary marches from 1905. Rough and
pungent melodies born, no one knows how, in the guerilla fight-
ing of Siberia and the Far East. The inspiring hymn of Budenny’s
Cavalry, surely among the greatest marching tunes in the world.
I have seen General Budenny’s huge mustaches stand at proud
attention, pointing upward like bayonets, when this march was
played in his honor at the races or during some demonstration.
The sight and the sound of the singing Red soldiers, swinging
along through the principal streets, became pleasantly intimate.
Years later, far from the place, a snatch of the familiar music,
echoing in memory, evoked for me the magnetic Moscow that
I love above all other cities I have known.

My memory, I think, is strongly aural: distinctive sounds re-
main in my mind long after other circumstances have faded and
they stir nostalgic emotional depths. My first years in Moscow
are suffused with the soldiers’ singing and the insistent church
bells. The bells would start sonorously somewhere in the city
and wake answering chimes on all sides in a thousand different
keys and measures until the world seemed brimful of living,
cavorting notes, chattering, scolding, exulting. Later the ringing
was prohibited as a public nuisance and the bells themselves were
hauled down and melted for their metals. But somewhere a few
timid bells had been overlooked in the sweep, and occasionally
they tinkled forlornly in the twilight.

Woven into the sound-memory is also the hoarse caw-caw of
the black crows swarming over the city and the cries of bearded

214 hallelujah!

Tartars in our back yard: “Staryo j)okufayeml n (We buy old
things.) The old-clothes men were silenced about the same time
as the bells. Only the crows could not be liquidated: they con-
tinued to rise like clouds of cinders when the Kremlin cannons
boomed a salute. The American jazz melody Hallelujah , strangely
Russianized, pulses through the memory too, something desper-
ately secretive about its forced gaiety ; it was played at half-
illicit house parties and in bourgeois hotels, so that it came to have
a counterpoint of yearning for the forbidden fleshpots of the capi-
talist world. And the International , whose powerful challenging
voice was something deeply personal for me, speaking of morn-
ings on East Broadway in the Socialist Sunday School. On Red
Square, in the opera house, wherever it was played, my mind
followed it automatically with the words I had learned as a school

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation,

Arise, ye wretched of the earth,

For justice thunders condemnation,

A better world’s in birth !

No more tradition’s chains shall bind us,

Arise, ye slaves, no more in thrall ;

The earth shall rise on new foundation,

We have been naught — we shall be all!

’Tis the final conflict.

Let each stand in his place!

The International Party
Shall be the human race!

The obbligato to my sound-memory, however, was the off-key
whining of little Sashka next door. We became accustomed to it in
the way one becomes accustomed to a chronic neuralgia. His voice
was a needle that threaded our home life with its zigzag of fine
wire.

Moscow was becoming more crowded every day and the job
of getting around the city more disagreeable. Eventually it forced
the correspondents to import automobiles, but at this point the
New York Times correspondent was the only one in the Ameri-
can corps thus provided. After a day of struggle on Soviet street-
cars, the loss of a leg in France seemed a small price to pay for
a motor car in Moscow 5 we almost envied Duranty his misfor-

ACCENT OF MOSCOW 21 $

tune. He had a neat trick o£ quoting “conversations in the street-
car” in his dispatches in gauging public sentiment on current
problems, as though to rub in the fact that he was the only one
who didn’t travel on street cars. The street-car conversations that I
recall were more concerned with the ethics of stepping on other
people’s toes and digging elbows into the abdomens of pregnant
women than with public affairs. In a New York subway quarrels
are left to their protagonists $ in a Moscow street-car nearly every-
one immediately takes sides and the argument becomes general,
continuing long after the offending party has been disgorged or
has retreated into guilty silence.

In the face of inhuman crowding and accumulating shortages,
the press and Soviet leaders talked of subways, new communal
housing, and plans to make the city the world’s most beautiful
capital. They boasted of their plans as though they were already
accomplishments. In life, as in my dispatches, every present-tense
discomfort was matched with a future-tense promise. The mass
of the population may have ignored these promises, but the smaller
group of communists, enthusiasts, “activists” found life more tol-
erable because they attuned it to the projected future. This capacity
to accept the plan for the reality occasionally led to disastrous
futility — too many planners felt that the job was completed once
they had perfected an impressive blueprint and framed it for their
office walls. But it also enabled them to relish in anticipation
things which were years off.

2

Except for desultory self-instruction in brief bursts of industry,
I did not study Russian. Yet words and entire sentences did begin,
amazingly, to emerge from the blur of gutturals. Immigrant varia-
tions on English are so common in America that we ignore them
or make sport of them. Russians, on the contrary, feel subtly flat-
tered that any glamorous foreigner should make the effort to
learn their humble folk speech. It seems curious to them, too, that
anyone able to speak mysterious foreign languages should find dif-
ficulty with the ordinary Russian that their children and the vil-
lage idiot speak so easily. They involved me in small talk often,
I am sure, merely for the joy of watching me butcher the tongue
of Pushkin and Tolstoy. If I failed to understand them, they

2 1 6 HALLELUJAH !

shouted louder and still louder, as though the fault were with
my hearing.

When they wished to know how I liked the Russian language
I assured them that “it’s not a language, it’s a torture.” There
was, in fact, no point of contact with English on which one could
take his stance in attacking the speech. Its very philosophy seemed
to me different from English — at once more complicated and
more naive, richer in colloquialisms and nuances, its meaning some-
how fuzzier and its accents more dramatic than in English. After
a while I gave up trying to juggle the grammatical endings. I
picked up the first one that came to hand, which was invariably
the wrong one. Billy and I were constantly asked about our rela-
tive progress, and time reduced the reply to a formula: “Gene
speaks better but Billy speaks more P

The semi-haze of language that separated me from Russians
lifted, and I felt less of a stranger among them. The arguments
in trolley cars and the grumblings on food lines, the casual re-
marks overheard on streets and the floods of amiable cabmen’s
obscenity began to make sense. The language in newspapers and on
the radio, being strongly political, seemed to me different enough
from everyday speech to constitute a new tongue. Russians told me
that for them, too, it was almost a foreign language, it was so clean-
cut in its meanings, lacking in the baby-talk diminutives, and so
full of Russianized Latin — mashinizatsiya industrializatsiya y elec -
trichesky y dialectichesky , etc. There is a historical moral in the
fact that there are no Russian words for the new life of indus-
trialization and socialism; practically its whole vocabulary is im-
ported.

My secretary-interpreter, Miss Jmudskaya, went through the
newspapers mechanically and made appointments for me with of-
ficials and searched for facts that could never be found. Her
boredom was undisguised. My eagerness to dig under the surface
of official news seemed to her, I am sure, a little ill-mannered.
Here I was receiving first-category rations, practically immune
against the G.P.U., allowed to go abroad whenever I wished, but
instead of being grateful I insisted ungraciously on prying into
the Kremlin’s private affairs. . . .

Besides the economic and political news which were the staples
of my daily work, I enjoyed seeking out and transmitting “human

ACCENT OF MOSCOW 217

interest” material that seemed to me authentically Russian, the
very stuff of Chekhov and Gogol and Dostoievsky. Among the
carbon copies of stories which survived somehow from those first
years (if only I had had the sense to save them all!) there are
a great many which begin: “Like an episode out of the most mor-
bid pages in Dostoievsky . . or words to that effect. Little
did Dostoievsky dream that one day he would be the mainstay
of foreign writers unable to understand or explain events in Bol-
shevik Russia!

One such story recounted the suicide of a former general in
the tsar’s army, the fifty-year-old Georgi N. Khvostchinsky. He
wrote a rambling ten-page letter to his Soviet employers in the
Leather Trust and shot himself through the brain. There is a
tale by Chekhov in which a petty chinovnik> or functionary, sneezes
in the theater and sprays a shining bald head in front of him.
He is shocked to discover when the man turns around that the
head belongs to the pompous director of his bureau, who frowns,
wipes his pate, and forgets about it. The chinovmk apologizes
profusely, passionately, he can think of nothing else and no longer
follows what is going on behind the footlights. Then he returns
home to brood on the enormity of what he did and in the end,
of course, kills himself. Citizen Khvostchinsky’s story is proof
that Chekhov did not exaggerate. At a conference of officials of
his trust, the ex-general suddenly remembered that he had failed
to carry out instructions transmitted to him months before. He
had placed the letter in his pocket and did not think of it again
until this conference. No one had noticed the mistake and there
had been no harm done. But the general, now a chinovmk, was
completely shaken up. Three days he tortured himself with
thoughts of his unworthiness and the losses which might have
accrued. Then he wrote the ten-page letter “confessing his crime”
and blew out his brains. A career begun amidst the brilliant trap-
pings of the old regime thus ended ridiculously in the littered
offices of a Soviet bureau.

Other episodes were equally fascinating for the vejy opposite
reason, because of their close relation to the revolutionary up-
heaval. A political assassination which did not receive nearly the
attention it deserved sticks in my mind. It was a perfect paral-

218 hallelujah!

lei, in many ways, to the shooting of Hetman Petliura several
months earlier in Paris by a young Jewish watchmaker named
Schwartzbard. Early in 1929, the press recorded briefly the shoot-
ing of Jacob Slashchev, Red Army commander, in his own apart-
ment in Moscow. A few days later it was disclosed that a twenty-
four-year-old Jew named Kolenberg was under arrest for the
murder. Beyond that the affair was veiled from public view by the
strictest official silence. But in time I managed to piece together
the ironical story.

In the civil war days, Slashchev had been General Slashchev
and had fought against the Reds under Denikin and under Wran-
gel. He won a reputation as a man without mercy and was credited
with the summary executions of thousands of communists and with
instigating endless pogroms on the Jews. About 1922, however,
he changed sides, and the Bolsheviks, sadly in need of trained
military men, gladly accepted his services. He taught in their
military academy and won himself a place of honor and respect
in the Red Army. The Soviet government had forgiven him —
but the surviving victims of his earlier cruelties had not. In one
of General Slashchev’s pogroms the father and one son in a wealthy
Jewish family near Kherson had been murdered. Another son,
then fifteen, had escaped. For nine long years he nursed passion-
ately the dream of vengeance. The boy’s name was Kolenberg and
his dream came true when he shot the White— now Red— general
in Moscow.

These were the things that gave news in Moscow their special
quality of the bizarre and their atmosphere of significance. Every-
thing that occurred had its specific “Soviet angle.” There was
the strange funeral on Red Square of Captain Paxton Hibben,
whom I had known in New York. Born in Indianapolis, a rela-
tive of President Hibben of Princeton, a former American diplo-
mat at the tsar’s court, he was interred as a Red hero in the New
Virgins’ Monastery on the fringe of Moscow near the graves of
many Romanovs. He died in New York but it was his last wish
that he be buried in the Russia he loved.

There was the endless piquancy of the aged Professor Pavlov,
the great physiologist, incessantly defying the new masters, flaunt-
ing his faith in God under the noses of the Godless, openly scold-
ing the proletarian government which supported his work and

ACCENT OF MOSCOW

219

took pride in his achievements. The Kremlin had begun to liqui-
date the bourgeois character of the Academy of Sciences by ex-
pelling some of the academicians and diluting the membership with
Bolshevik additions. Professor Pavlov raised no objections to Buk-
harin, Pokrovsky, and Ryazanov, but he denounced other candi-
dates as ignoramuses whose admission would disgrace the Academy
founded by Peter the Great. The liquidation went on despite his
thunders; within a year or two the Academy was as meekly obedi-
ent as any communist cell. But the spectacle of one man who was
permitted to speak his mind among one hundred and sixty mil-
lion was sufficiently exciting.

Most exciting of all, however, were the things that did not
make “stories” for the press — the impact of daily life, daily dis-
comforts, widening human contacts. I visited dozens of Soviet
offices in the course of routine work, until their noise, tea-drinking,
shabby signs and posters, amateur “wall papers,” and their litter
of cigarette stubs and mislaid papers, their hopeless slowness and
confusion, no longer seemed strange or exasperating. I became
familiar with the aroma and the beat of museums, cooperative
shops and department stores, factories, movie houses, and tourist
show-places like nurseries and model prisons. The sense of strange-
ness never quite wore off. Moscow can never become completely
intimate to a foreigner as Paris, London or Vienna might. The
margin of bafflement and paradox may be narrowed but it can
never be quite erased. Each time I returned from a vacation,
I confronted the capital’s heaped-up desperations and magnificence
with new wonderment and a revived hunger to absorb it some-
how with mind and senses.

But mine was no longer that hectic, flushed reaction of the first
arrival: no longer the bewildered anxiety that I saw driving
tourists to test, argue, or explain away everything they met. Even
the symbols of the revolution with familiarity lost their edge
of the miraculous. The existences of individual men and women,
somehow overlooked in the obsession of sociological research and
the to-do about historical novelties, began to register on my mind.
So gradually that I was not aware of it, I began to see the physi-
cal and social landscape through Russian eyes. The people you
met took the revolution for granted, and its evolution mattered

220 hallelujah!

only to the extent that it affected their own jobs, food supplies,
housing, and safety.

You might discuss the news of the day— the latest bend in the
Party line or the arrival of the British businessmen’s delegation—
with Soviet journalists, officials, communists. But you avoided
such things in conversation with Gisa, who worked in a clothing
factory, or Nick, who was a rising cameraman in a movie trust,
or the novelist Zamyatin, whose political standing was too un-
steady to be tampered with. Everyone carried his private load
of troubles, love tangles, ambitions and frustrations and took no
more interest in larger national policies than the average New
Yorker.

But national policies here affected the individual’s life more
q uickl y and more directly than in most other countries— the de-
pendence of ordinary people upon the moods and methods of the
Kremlin was greater and more obvious. Whatever we talked about,
whatever we did together, therefore had for me deeper significance.
The kind of shows we saw, our skiing excursions, the clothes Gisa
wore, the picture Nick was doing, the story Zamyatin had suc-
ceeded in passing through the censorship, had for me social im-
plications of which they were not themselves conscious.

3

There is much to be said for round-world flights, no doubt,
as sport and as science. But no Moscow correspondent can rea-
sonably be expected to say it. The things we did say are not fit
to print. Russia sprawls across half of Europe and all of Asia — •
some seven thousand miles and each of those miles an acute head-
ache for American reporters in the Soviet capital. It was our
business to report the whereabouts of fliers from the moment
they crossed into Russia until they left a few days later, or were
properly smashed up. Nobody along the route was especially in-
terested in keeping the world advised of these specks in the Rus-
sian skies. Besides, in Russia stretches of country as wide as a
few World Powers are unpopulated wildernesses.

In the early ’30’s the circumglobular headaches became chronic.
We became familiar with the sleepless nights, the feverish search-
ing, and the frantic inquiries from the home office. But in August,

ACCENT OF MOSCOW

22 I

1929, the thing was still a novelty. All I was expected to do, sit-
ting in my remodeled stable on Clean Ponds Boulevard, was to
follow and report accurately the course of the Graf Zeppelin on
the Russian leg of its first world-circling flight, from the time the
dirigible sailed across the Latvian frontier until it touched the brink
of the Pacific.

My principal competitors in this matter were the other two
American press agency men, and both of them had handicaps on
me. International News Service representatives were on board the
Zeppelin and would report directly by short-wave radio. The As-
sociated Press, because of its contractual relations with the Soviet
news agency, Tass, would have a monopoly of such information as
the Soviet press obtained. The United Press had nothing but
succinct and emphatic instructions to offer me, the gist of which
was that I must cover the flight in detail, faster and more ac-
curately than anyone else.

The Zeppelin’s path across the Russian continents had been
announced in advance. It was to follow the main highway to Mos-
cow, and then the Trans-Siberian railroad tracks to Manchuria
and Tokyo. All I needed to do, obviously, was to station a relay
of scouts along the whole route to wire the news to me as soon
as they sighted the German giant. That being impossible, I did
the next best thing. I wrote to the editor of the local newspaper
in the larger cities along the route. I told him that one of these
days or nights the famous Zeppelin would be flying over his
district. It was his manifest duty as a public-spirited citizen and
builder of socialism in one country, I explained in effect, to in-
form the world instantly when the Zeppelin comes in view, and
the only way to do that was to flash the fact to the United Press
reporter in Moscow. I addressed him as “dear colleague” — as one
newspaperman to another— and made him realize that in helping
me he was breaking the narrow walls of provincial journalism
and entering the wide open spaces of international news.

Rather to my astonishment, most of them agreed. Unbeknown
to my competitors I therefore had volunteer correspondents sta-
tioned all along the Zeppelin’s charted path. Each of. them had
telegraph forms addressed to myself ready to send, with a space
in which to write in the exact time of the sighting.

The indifferent Miss Jmudskaya being rather helpless in such

222

HALLELUJAH !

subtle maneuvering, I hired the services of an aggressive Russian
boy named Grisha Gruzd. Grisha was twenty-two or -three and
had lived in Chicago several years ; he boasted a go-getting streak
rare in Russians. Grisha interviewed the officials of the Soviet so-
ciety of amateur radio short-wave enthusiasts and induced them
to instruct members throughout the country to eavesdrop on the
Zeppelin and report what they could learn of its whereabouts to
Moscow headquarters. He established friendly relations, too, with
the aviation department in the Comsomol organization. Then we
sat back and waited 5 nervously, but not without confidence. The
United Press never cries “uncle.”

On August 7, the dirigible took off from Lakehurst, N. J.
On August 14, it took off from Friedrichshafen, Germany, headed
for Moscow. I wired my volunteer brigade that their big mo-
ment was at hand. The next day the ship crossed the Latvian
border and was, so to speak, in my lap.

And then my plans were sent flying higher than a dirigible. The
Zeppelin blithely broke its promise and took a course a mere
hundred miles or so to the north of its projected line and, what
is more to the point, north of my line of volunteers. It was a
good plan— I am still proud of it— but it didn’t work. Two dozen
provincial editors lost their one chance to contribute to world
journalism gratis. Because of weather conditions, Commander
Eckener steered some thirty miles north of Moscow and main-
tained that bias along a route that took him over uninhabited
Siberian tundra instead of the railroad line. He saved a few
hundred miles’ distance and no one was the worse but a dis-
traught reporter on Clean Ponds Boulevard.

Grisha was even more distressed than his chief. His blond hair
stood on end and the sweat of honest chagrin ran down his col-
lar.

“At least,” he consoled me, “we still have the amateur short-
wavers to fall back on. That arrangement is air-tight!”

I agreed that hope lay in that direction, and thither Grisha
rushed. But short-wave headquarters had closed for the day!
Our brilliant arrangements remained a theoretical triumph. We
caught the Comsomol aviation enthusiasts about to shut down their
offices as well, and induced them to remain open beyond then-
usual hours. With their assistance we did obtain a few “sight-

ACCENT OF MOSCOW 22 3

ings.” Meanwhile I opened long-distance parleys with newspapers
this side of the Urals in cities along the new course and was for-
tunate enough to run across another sighting or two, enough to
save my editors in New York, London, Berlin, and Tokyo from
apoplexy. The telephoning had to be done at the main Telegraph
Building j no long-distance connections could be obtained at that
time at any other place.

The Zeppelin sailed on majestically while the reporters phoned
and fretted and guessed at its location. Sverdlovsk was then the
most easterly point within telephone reach. According to my
vague calculations the dirigible should be passing that city some-
time after midnight. But the Sverdlovsk paper could not be reached
by telephone. Comsomol headquarters were shutting down. There
seemed not the slightest chance of news till next morning, and
eight hours without news — particularly when my opposition might
be well supplied with it — was a serious matter.

“The fellow at the Comsomol office,” Grisha said, “suggested
that if you couldn’t get the Sverdlovsk paper you might try the
military kommandant there.”

I clutched at this straw. Grisha asked to be connected with the
garrison at Sverdlovsk. When the connection was made, he asked
for the commander. I told him what to say.

“I am calling you,” he said under my instructions, “at the sug-
gestion of the Comsomol organization here in Moscow. I am
speaking for a foreign correspondent. The Zeppelin should be
passing Sverdlovsk. Is there any sign of it? The Zeppelin! A
German dirigible. You never heard of it? Well, you’re hearing
of it now. We’ll be obliged if you watch for it and we’ll call
you back.”

The garrison head had seemed terribly impressed by the long-
distance call, and upset because he knew nothing of the Zeppelin
that was coming toward his post.

About an hour later we called once more. Again Grisha merely
acted as my mouthpiece. I emphasize this for reasons that will
soon become clear.

“Has the dirigible passed yet?” he asked. “What! A battalion?
My God!”

He dropped the receiver. He was pale and he trembled.

“What is it? Take a hold of yourself!” I pleaded.

HALLELUJAH !

224

Grisha stammered:

“The commander said ... the Zeppelin hasn’t come yet . . .
but . . . well, he has a battalion in the field, waiting for it!”

“He has!” It was my turn to grow excited. “Here’s where the
round-world flight ends on the fields of Sverdlovsk, like the last
of the Romanovs.”

We stood there in the Telegraph Building staring at a vision
of the unsuspecting Zeppelin being riddled by rifle fire. It was
evident that the kommandant was under the mistaken impression
that he was in contact with Comsomol headquarters. And why
should he order out a battalion except to bring down the Ger-
man invader?

Our first instinct was to flee from the scene. There seemed
small hope of getting the long-distance connection in time to
avoid a catastrophe — that a catastrophe was in the making seemed
certain to our over-wrought, fatigued minds. Then I decided to
try it anyhow. It took an hour to get Sverdlovsk again and it
felt like a week. Finally the commander was at the other end.
It was now about 3 a.m.

“The dirigible passed here a minute ago,” he reported cheer-
fully.

Our fears had been unwarranted. The intentions of the bat-
talion had been friendly from the first. Yet we felt as though a
disaster had been narrowly averted. I flashed the Sverdlovsk
sighting and it proved a “scoop” over the opposition correspond-
ents by several hours.

Beyond the Urals it was impossible to trace the Zeppelin. I
sent such scraps of information as I could beg or steal from the
editorial rooms of the Moscow newspapers. All of us were still
looking for the ship somewhere over Lake Baikal when it landed
safely in Tokyo.

I paid Grisha off and thanked him for his help. He seemed
in a nervous state over the night we had spent in the Telegraph
Building. Contact with military garrisons, even in as innocent
a matter as a world flight, and merely in the role of intermediary,
was not to the taste of Soviet citizens.

His apprehensions were well grounded. Early one morning a
few days after he left my employ, Grisha’s wife came to me in
tears. The G.P.U. wagon had come that night and taken him

ACCENT OF MOSCOW 225

away. I called at the Foreign Office instantly to lodge a protest.
Whatever the boy had done, it had been as my mouthpiece, and
if anyone was to be punished it was I, I insisted. Besides, we had
done nothing remotely wrong. At most we were guilty of ex-
cessive zeal in obtaining information on a matter that surely was
not secret.

“The arrest of Citizen Gruzd,” I was told suavely, “has noth-
ing whatsoever to do with his work for you, Mr. Lyons.”

I knew that this was untrue, but there was no way I could
prove it. Day after day I fumed at the Foreign Office and elicited
the same smiling assurance that Grisha’s crimes were in no way
related to his brief employment with the United Press.

Through sources which I dare not disclose here, however, I
learned definitely that the phone calls to Sverdlovsk were respon-
sible for Grisha’s exile to a Northern concentration camp for
three years. I did not hear from him again directly. Indirectly I
learned that he had been given an office job at Kim, outpost of
the forced-labor lumber regions, and was therefore in a better
position than other prisoners. In reading Professor Tchernavin’s
book I Speak for the Silent six years later I found Grisha’s name
mentioned casually among the people whom the author had met.

When Grisha returned to Moscow in 1932, he very carefully
avoided meeting any foreigners. He had burned his fingers. That
go-getting streak acquired in Chicago would not get him into
any more trouble if he could help it.

XIV. Picnicking in a Graveyard

ADVANCE divisions of the Great Tourist Invasion reached Mos-
cow during this summer of 1929. The main body of amateur
sociologists, bubbly school teachers, liberal ministers, earnest
probers, socialite thrill hunters, and miscellaneous neurotics did
not take posssesion until the following years.

They were predominantly Americans, these tourist hordes. And
they were a new breed of the Baedeker animal. Not scenery but
statistics, not the exotic but the economic, mattered to them. Every
alimony widow killing time by travel turned political economist
on crossing the Soviet frontier. Every undergraduate and tractor
salesman hatched the original notion of telling “the whole truth”
at last about Russia in books and articles. These new-style tourists
had a hectic mental complexion: they were flushed with special
fervors and intent upon proving something to themselves or to
others.

So they bustled from museum to creche to factory dining hall,
from theater to workers’ club to ballet, taking notes, snapping pic-
tures, and gushing with enthusiasm. Their theme song was “Ah!
and Oh!” Nice girl guides answered their embarrassing questions
with pat phrases and were set right by the interrogators themselves
if the answers deviated from the standard formulas. They inter-
viewed minor officials whom they mistook for real “commissars.”
In other countries they had been left to shift for themselves.
Here they were herded and guided and stuffed with information.
There were organizations devoted to their enlightenment on all
matters Soviet.

It all made them feel important and their visits seemed some-
how significant. The most modest of them began to feel a little like
a “delegation;” two or more foreigners arriving anywhere in
Russia, even at a lavatory, were a delegatsiya in Russian eyes.
Most of the Soviet solicitousness, it is true, was pretty messy and
there was plenty of squawking among the visitors. They threatened

226

PICNICKING IN A GRAVEYARD 227

to write to Stalin, and a few of them did, to complain about the
way the faucet leaked. Even the privilege of protesting self-
importantly about the inefficiency and confusion, however, was a
unique experience in self-assertion for tourists, normally the meek-
est of mortals.

To the Russians these foreigners were an endless source of
wonder. From their places on the block-long food queues Mus-
covites stared at these creatures from another planet, so sleek,
so brisk, so free, in their strange plus-fours and glamorous store
gowns and stout walking shoes and tortoise-shell spectacles. Tour-
ists could not guess that behind the seemingly vacant eyes and
expressionless faces anger flared at the sight of these satisfied
strangers. They could not guess that the muttered remarks of
Russians who gazed after them were far from complimentary.

Once I was with a group of Americans who stopped to talk to
a Russian woman outside a bakery 5 one of those things that would
enable them to write, “I talked personally with ordinary Russians
and despite the barrier of language I sensed their devotion to
the Five Year Plan.” It fell to me to interpret. The woman an-
swered our questions evasively, trying to say the “proper” thing
and embarrassed by the attention. As she talked she fingered the
stuff of an American dress and studied the women’s hats and
shoes. Then, timidly, she inquired about the cost of various items
of our clothing and whether they were difficult to get. Finally
she said in a deprecating voice in which there was an undertone
of cautious irony:

“Ask them how they like our life here.”

I translated the consensus of group opinion:

“They think your life is very difficult just now, but most in-
teresting!”

“Interesting!” The woman made a wry face; the word cracked
her discretion. “Interesting! Sure, it’s interesting to watch a house
on fire. But we’re in it! Tell them that, citizen!” And she turned
away angrily.

That resentment was not exceptional. Even functionaries whose
business it was to propagandize the tourists privately despised them
for their complacent gullibility. Americans and Englishmen and
Germans who raised a row because there was no toilet paper in
their rooms were eloquent in justifying hardships for Russians.

228 hallelujah!

They were prepared to see the Five Year Plan through to the
bitter end if it killed every last Russian in the land.

Between mouthfuls of chicken a la Kievsky they said, “What if
it does mean the sacrifice of a generation, or two generations, if
it helps the construction of socialism!” Loudly and lustily they
exercised their precious freedom of speech to prove that it was
all right to muzzle Russians.

To me there was from the first something obscene in the in-
vasion of smug foreigners in this time of national distress. Often
I liked them individually. They brought a welcome whiff of home.
Entertaining visiting firemen was one of Billy’s and my own chief
occupations during tourist seasons and we enjoyed most of it thor-
oughly y some of those who came to us with letters of intro-
duction we now count among our dearest friends. All the same
there seemed to me a scavenger element in the business of pry-
ing into a nation’s open wounds and exclaiming over the lovely
Russian sacrifices. I had been in the country long enough, ap-
parently, to see through Russian eyes.

If only these tourists showed some sympathy and humility in
the face of a nation’s travail! Their gushing enthusiasm seemed
to me an insult to those who suffered, and I knew many men and
women who smarted under that insult. Rare, indeed, was the
tourist with enough sense of humor to recognize the absurdity of
the whole procedure. Rarer yet was the tourist with enough
humanity to feel decently apologetic to the Russians before whom
he paraded his well-fed, well-dressed body. For the most part
the attitude of tourists implied that the current miseries were a
divertissement staged for their edification.

They guarded their foreign passports like the apple of their
eye while sizzling with enthusiasm over this “new Soviet civiliza-
tion.” They gave their cast-off store clothes to guides and other
deserving natives while packing away statistics of Soviet produc-
tion marvels. It was all most cozy, combining the joy of travel
with the pleasures of social research. Too few of them realized
that they were picnicking in a graveyard.

“They should be sent in batches to Solovky and Narym in
cattle cars — that might knock the smugness out of our fellow
countrymen,” an incisive American engineer said, and I agreed
warmly.

PICNICKING IN A GRAVEYARD 229

The most insufferable of the breed were the twittering Ameri-
can intellectuals of the Left. At the drop of a hat they were ready
to argue solid facts out of existence. They asked questions, and if
the answer was out of line with their convictions, they proceeded
gently to set you straight. Condescendingly they explained that
the talk of food stringency and concentration camps was “exag-
gerated, you know.” They were even astounded to find “Riga in-
ventions” credited by Moscow correspondents and put it all down
■ to a “bourgeois mentality.” Their smiling denials of things re-
corded and admitted by the Soviet government itself sometimes
goaded me into telling them more of the facts than I intended.
I was furious with them and with myself for being driven into
disclosing more than I did in my published dispatches.

2

The most redoubtable contingent in this summer’s invasion con-
sisted of ninety-odd American politicians, journalists, educators,
salesmen, and assorted big-thrill hunters calling themselves for
some mysterious reason a “businessmen’s delegation.” Its outstand-
ing figure was Albert Ottinger, a former Attorney-General of
New York State, then considered gubernatorial timber. A loud,
bustling, thick-set little man of the back-slapping school, he pro-
vided the window dressing for the supposed delegation. The con-
tingent was honeycombed with professional friends of the new
Russia who had made a business of being go-betweens for the
Soviets — men who were used by the Kremlin but distrusted.

It was the largest organized group of Americans that had ever
arrived on the Soviet scene, and the government went the limit
in entertaining them. They visited all the standard show places,
trooped through factories, tanked up on statistics, and took a long
trip through the country. On their return to Moscow the authori-
ties tendered them a banquet which was to remain an indelible
memory in the American colony. Billy helped the Grand Hotel
dance orchestra to learn the Star-s'pangled Banner for the occasion
— for all her efforts, it sounded like a Russian folk song in synco-
pated rhythm when the great moment arrived. Important Soviet
trade and cultural bureaucrats were present. A meal in grand-ducal
style was served. Then there were speeches, mutual eulogies, and

230 hallelujah!

fervent promises that the two greatest “republics” on earth would
get together.

The main speech, of course, was Mr. Ottinger’s. This well-
meaning gentleman had been a politician too long to change his
spots, and he orated for all the world as if he were seeking the
Soviet nomination for governor. His peroration is memorable.
Having enlarged on the wonders he had witnessed in the U.S.S.R.
he raised his arm, turned his eyes heavenward, and exclaimed:

“And I trust, my friends, that with God's helf you will carry
your wonderful Five Year Plan to a great success!”

I don’t know how God felt about this invocation, but the God-
less Bolshevik officials were most embarrassed.

I knew a great many members of this delegation, having worked
with some of them in the American radical and liberal movements.
Through them I learned with a shock that hurt more than I cared
to acknowledge, that I had already been ostracized by my former
comrades in New York.

The Press Department in Moscow, it is true, reckoned me
among the most “friendly” correspondents, despite occasional
clashes. But pro-Soviet circles in New York had cast me off. My
writing evidently conveyed more than I was myself aware. The
doubts and questioning that were under the surface of my mind
showed up in an ironic phrase, a cynical turn of thought, a stress
on the untidy side of Soviet life which had passed not only the
official censors, but the far more rigorous censorship I was applying
to myself.

The instinct of my former friends was correct. They had
smelled out the waning of my imported beliefs. So they disowned
me in a panic before the friendship might disturb their own com-
fortable faith.

Loyalty to my own years as Soviet propagandist was at the
bottom of my efforts to clean up the Soviet picture for foreign
perusal. Consistency is an overrated virtue. I needed many years
to recognize that intellectual integrity must take precedence over
surface consistencies. But the anxiety to retain my standing among
my radical friends, too, was a strong element in my attitude. I re-
called the unreasoned hatreds that had flared in my own heart
against those who dared to question the sublime wisdom and un-

PICNICKING IN A GRAVEYARD 23 I

tarnished idealism of the Kremlin. The fear that such hatreds
might now be directed against me was most unpleasant.

The need to satisfy my former comrades as to my basic loyalty
to the revolution was always with me. Kenneth Durant, in partic-
ular, was looking over my shoulder as I typed my stories — bitter,
biting, intolerant — and I knew that I could count on neither under-
standing nor forgiveness. The circumstance that he was still writing
me in the old affectionate, comradely manner seemed to me a
solacing proof that I was not the political renegade others made
me out.

Then I learned the truth from one of the delegates. Durant’s
friendly correspondence was a “blind,” while privately he spread
tales about my apostasy. The news was like a physical blow. I
wrote him a long letter in which I tried to explain my sentiments
and asked whether it was true that he was attacking me. I knew
his dyspeptic bitterness too intimately to doubt that what I heard
was the truth, yet I hoped illogically that he would deny or ex-
plain it away. It was easier, I tried to make him see, to remain
unmoved by colossal miseries from a point five thousand miles
off than when they are under your eyes. If my reactions to the
Russian realities were not to his taste, did he not know me well
enough to grant at least that I was acting honestly within my
own rights?

The answer was prompt and incisive. It was one of those master-
pieces of satirical invective I had watched him indite against many
another man during the four years we worked together. The gist
of it was that I was an “ingrate” — as though he expected me to
suppress what I saw and felt, out of gratitude to him!

Thus I knew that forever after I would be among the private
demons to whose extermination Durant’s inverted Quakerism was
dedicated. The friendly correspondence had been a machiavellian
trick. For months the shock of this break in a long friendship was
with me. It rankled. It was not the loss of one man’s good opinion
that bothered me, but the proof that I had cut the bridges between
myself and the communist milieu in America. At the moment it
was depressing: I had lost the comfortable feeling of belonging
to a group. Excommunication from a church is a painful matter
even if the communicant’s faith has faltered. But in the long-run
it proved a wholesome purge. The lacings of the straitjacket of

232 hallelujah!

conformity on my mind and conscience were loosened. Durant’s
inquisitorial eyes no longer peered over my shoulder as I wrote
my stories.

3

The Journalists’ Club, an organization of Soviet newspaper writ-
ers, presented a hilarious skit to an invited audience. It showed a
Soviet citizen abroad trying to study the life of foreigners but
everywhere meeting only more Russians. Every time he thinks he
has cornered a genuine specimen of the genus foreigner, it turns
out to be another Russian on some economic or scientific mission.
In the final scene the traveler returns to Moscow and announces
that the only place to study the life of foreigners is among the
American correspondents and engineers in the U.S.S.R.

The allusion was twofold, to the growing number of Russians
sent to foreign lands to buy machinery or study technique, and
to the greater number of foreign specialists drawn into Russia.

There is a magic word in the new Russia: kommdirovka. It is
a shiny business-like word with a foreign look to it and has a
fascination for modern Russians among their new technical toys.
It may be roughly translated as “assignment” though it carries
overtones of self-importance and military precision to the Russian
ear. The simplest errand from one town to another becomes a
komandirovka and transforms the errand boy into an official. At
any given moment a hundred thousand Russian functionaries are
on trains and ships, rushing slowly from one city to another on
urgent komandirovkas, drawing the additional pay allowed while
traveling and indulging the sense of expanded prestige that comes
with an urgent mission. Elsewhere most such missions are accom-
plished by letters or telephone calls. But the method of komandi-
rovkay or face-to-face negotiation, flatters the Russian weakness for
dramatizing commonplaces and turning the simplest matters into
“problems.” The word has cost the Soviet regime millions of
rubles, but it has given a hundred thousand portfolio-bearing citi-
zens the illusion of accomplishing things. They shuttle back and
forth between Moscow and Leningrad, Moscow and Vladivostok,
carrying little pieces of paper with big seals and flowing signatures
on them. Their assignments are always urgent or super-urgent

PICNICKING IN A GRAVEYARD 233

and a lot of poor devils are forced off trains to make room for
them.

The most sought-after assignment, naturally, was the foreign
kommdirovka. The needs of the Plan opened enormous oppor-
tunities for visits beyond the Soviet frontiers. Thousands of big
and little officials who had for years been dreaming of capitalist
fleshpots now schemed for a foreign assignment: to investigate
German or American practice in some industry, to inspect a ma-
chinery purchase, to engage foreign specialists in some line, etc.
Hundreds of them succeeded in going abroad. The rigorous pro-
hibition of foreign travel gave the outside world a dizzy allure.
The Soviet press might describe the bourgeois countries as swamps
of poverty, iniquity and exploitation; the Soviet theater and cinema
might paint the capitalist world as a madhouse of jazz, courtesans,
and bourgeois degeneracy. This propaganda only sharpened the
R uss ian appetite for foreign countries: those supposed treasure-
houses of victuals, soft textiles, limousines, and uninhibited fun.

There was endless talk among Russians in the first flush of the
Plan about these foreign visits. Za-granitsei, literally “beyond-the-
frontiers,” loomed large on the horizons of hope. Those chosen
seemed to their fellows the favorites of fate, like winners in the
sweepstakes. They returned self-conscious in new clothes, wearing
collars and neckties, and bringing foreign five-and-ten-cent lux-
uries to amaze their friends. At public meetings in clubs and fac-
tories they talked of the misery and exploitation out there, giving
“abroad” credit only for its high industrial skill. In private they
glowed with the excitement of remembering well-stocked stores
and movie palaces, night clubs and fashionable clothes.

But a large proportion of them did not return at all. The lure
of the unaccustomed plenitude, the sudden release from the pres-
sures of discipline and fear, went to their heads. They became
emigres, cut off forever from their families and friends in the
Soviet Union. Desertions became so extensive that the Kremlin
tightened the selective process. Only the more trustworthy were
chosen for foreign komandirovkas. If there was a shadow of doubt,
their wives were not allowed to accompany them, serving as hos
tag-es for the speedy return of their husbands. Many a wife, how-
ever, was sacrificed by officials who could not face Soviet life again
after the intoxication of a lop-sided but relatively free world. In

234 hallelujah!

the end the government prescribed death as the punishment for
officials who did not return in time, should the deserters return
to their native soil. Thereafter an emissary outstaying his leave
unduly knew that he must remain an emigre forever.

The American colony took on mushroom luxuriance as the Plan
got well under way. Notwithstanding the absence of diplomatic
relations, the juiciest plums in the way of “technical aid” contracts
went to American firms. By the end of the first year of the Plan,
our specialists were at work on the whole “industrialization front,”
directing construction projects, installing machinery, teaching Rus-
sians to run American machines, acting as foremen, or negotiating
new contracts. Scores of skilled workers were imported as fore-
men, teachers, rationalizers. A fairly good foreign mechanic could
pass muster as an engineer, at the least a “technician,” with the
emoluments in cash and prestige that the title carried.

A year earlier, we knew every American in Moscow. The ar-
rival of another compatriot was an event. But now their number
was too large for such close contact. They filled the best hotels,
special apartment houses were told off for their use, or they shared
quarters with Russians in houses belonging to their production
trust. Construction experts, road builders, steel specialists, textile
technicians — by twos and by the dozen they flocked to the land of
the hammer and sickle: most of them hard-headed, open-eyed
men who knew their jobs inside out but neither knew nor cared
two cents about economic theories and social ideals.

This political naivete or indifference proved to be their strongest
card in the difficult game of working with Russian bureaucrats and
adjusting themselves to the peculiar living conditions in the new
land. The Kremlin leaders came to value the single-track minds
of these strange apolitical Americans who were neither for nor
against Bolshevism but merely doing a technical job well. In the
various sabotage trials involving suspicion of foreign collusion,
Americans were never even mentioned. The phlegmatic, cigar-
smoking American, honest, efficient but politically illiterate, be-
came a standardized type in the Soviet theater and screen plays
of the Five Year Plan era.

Doing business with a bureaucratic government was not always
easy and a great deal of friction inevitably developed. Soviet

PICNICKING IN A GRAVEYARD 2 35

agencies made serious blunders in hiring men and were constantly
chagrined because square pegs would not fit into round holes. At
other times foreigners pretended to technical qualifications 'they
did not possess and covered their ignorance with bluster and pro-
test. Russian representatives abroad too frequently made promises
in the matter of living and working conditions which the home
office in Moscow or the Urals was unable to keep.

But principally the trouble grew out of psychological incompati-
bility. It took an exceptionally adaptable man to work in the
atmosphere of confusion, the clutter of red tape, and the pervasive
helplessness of an average Soviet factory or construction job. Scores
of American specialists poured the tales of woe into my ears. Their
complaints added up to an indictment of the Russian character
complicated by bureaucratic fear of responsibility. The Damocles
sword of a sabotage charge hung over every Russian administra-
tor’s and engineer’s head, making him jumpy, over-cautious, or
nervously over-bold, and above all anxious to foist the onus of a
definite decision on someone else. Americans felt themselves tan-
gled in office intrigues they could not possibly understand. The
largest single item of complaint was the pigeon-holing of plans
and suggestions. Any number of my closer friends among the
technicians spent most of their time and energy in forcing action
— a clear-cut acceptance, rejection or criticism — on the ideas which
they were engaged and well paid to work out.

There is the story, now a classic, of the American executive
brought to Moscow to help rationalize the railroad system. The
commissariat had moved heaven and earth to lure him into its
service and was paying him a fabulous fee. But having arrived
at the capital, he was obliged to hang around the Metropole Hotel
for days, then weeks, before he could so much as meet the appro-
priate officials, meanwhile drawing his big salary. There was the
highly qualified engineer imported from New Jersey to help
organize production in a ball-bearing factory only to find that the
factory had not yet been built j his contract was up about the time
the plant was completed. I remember the distress of a well-known
technical expert held in such high regard that the government
put a special car at his disposal from the frontier to the capital.
Once in the capital, however, he could not find a place to sleep

236 hallelujah!

and spent the first night on a cot in a common bathroom at the
Grand Hotel.

Despite the mountainous muddle and wastage of technical tal-
ent, however, there is no question that foreign technical brains
made a tremendous contribution to Russia’s headlong industriali-
zation. Russia was able to buy experience that other nations had
attained in slow and costly experimentation. Those who make glib
comparisons between the percentual growth of industry in Russia
and that in other capitalist countries fail to discount this factor.
They speak as though the Soviet regime were starting from scratch,
as the bourgeois world had started with the industrial revolution,
instead of starting with a century of cumulative progress.

Each time Moscow imported a new machine it was taking a
short-cut over a road other nations took decades to prepare. It
transported bodily plants and processes from Detroit, Gary, Man-
chester, Lyons, and Munich that had cost other countries gener-
ations of experiment. Russia does not represent a new industriali-
zation so much as an extension of Western industry. It is in the
new social institutions, the new relations between man and machine,
that Russia differs and it is on those things rather than on indus-
trialization fer se that the world’s judgment of the Soviet regime
must rest.

4

Counting over in my mind the American and other foreign
specialists whom I knew most intimately, I find that they fall
into two distinct categories. Those who belonged emphatically to
one or the other class succeeded in their dealings with the Soviet
machine j the rest merely muddled through and went back home
soured.

Jack Calder of Detroit will serve as the type of one category.
Jack was a tall, lean, staccato person, pipe-smoking and hard-boiled.
Enough of a diplomat to avoid offending his Soviet employers,
he nevertheless talked sharply to those in power and used the big
stick against those under his direction. His was the self-confidence
of precise knowledge and executive ability; he worked hard and
drove astonished Russians to follow his pace and ignored politics.
He considered himself a hired expert paid to do specific jobs and
limited his Russian interests to those practical tasks. Though

PICNICKING IN A GRAVEYARD Z^J

startled and sometimes infuriated by his clean-cut concentration of
purpose, the Russians soon learned to appreciate him and his type.
The construction of the world’s largest tractor plant in Stalingrad
was his outstanding achievement and the Kremlin rushed him to
critical points in their construction again and again 5 they recog-
nized that he needed and welcomed authority and responsibility
and gave him plenty of both. A few years later the Vakhtangoff
Theater put on the play Temfo* The American engineer “Car-
ter” who figures in the story was modeled frankly on Calder, and
it was a characterization of which no American need be ashamed.

I shall not embarrass anyone by naming an exemplar of the
other category, no less successful if much less useful. Those familiar
with Moscow, Kharkov, and other cities in these years will in-
stantly fill in appropriate names. The type is readily recognizable.
He devoted more energy to “social work” than to the job for
which he was hired. He made speeches, wrote articles, professed
a new-born enthusiasm for the Soviet cause and denounced slack-
ers, saboteurs, and infidels with “bourgeois mentalities.” Ostenta-
tiously he hobnobbed with communists, ingratiated himself by
flattery and a great display of public spirit. Some of these Soviet
Rotarians may, in addition, have known the specialty for which
they were being paid. Rut most of them were second-rate and con-
sciously or instinctively hid their technical shortcomings in the din
and glare of ideological fireworks. They served the government as
show pieces of its success in winning over bourgeois engineers to
the Soviet cause. A few no doubt yelled themselves into a sincere
belief in Bolshevism 3 the rest were self-important frauds, cl own-
ing endlessly to safeguard their jobs. For the most part they were
heartily despised by the hard-working, close-mouthed, and efficient
Calders.

The problems of physical adjustment faced by the specialists
were often formidable. The government took the sensible view
that foreigners must as far as possible be provided with a standard
of living to which they were accustomed at home. In more remote
sections of the country this policy could rarely be put into effect.
Foreigners shared the miserable barracks and limited diets and

* Included in the English-language anthology of post-revolutionary drama,
Six Soviet Plays , edited by Eugene Lyons.

2 3 8 HALLELUJAH !

other hardships with Russians. In Moscow and other centers, spe-
cial housing and feeding facilities were made available to them.
The Eliseyev store on the Tverskaya was set aside for the use of
foreigners. There they could purchase rationed food products,
liquor, and cigarettes in quantities which were strictly limited but
many times greater than the most favored Soviet categories of
employees received. At first the diplomatic corps and foreign cor-
respondents also used this emporium. Then a separate provision
shop on the Petrovka was organized for diplomats and journalists,
the Eliseyev remaining at the disposal of the specialists.

Access to these stores set the lucky privileged few apart from
the harassed population. A card to the foreign store became the
supreme boon within the Kremlin’s gift. A handful of Russians —
famous writers, theatrical directors and the like— were given this
boon and were thereby set as far above their fellows as an Ameri-
can multimillionaire is above his butler. The foreigner entitled to
buy at the Eliseyev or an equivalent shop in another city found
himself sought after by practical ladies of easy virtue for his food
supply, much as a wealthy man under capitalism might be sought
after for his bank account.

Many a citizen of the U.S.A. wondered in the wee hours of
the night whether the Tanya or Olya or Irina by his side loved
him or loved his food card more.

Very few of the specialists brought their families to Russia.
The year or two for which they had signed up was a sort of
enlistment, after which they would resume their familiar lives at
home. But most of them came to relish the exile. In Kalamazoo
or Des Moines they were hard-worked nobodies struggling to
make both ends meet. In Moscow they were a privileged class.
In the fast-growing inflation their dollar incomes made them rich
men in comparison with their ruble-earning neighbors. Their
special rations, comfortable hotel rooms or individual apartments,
imported clothes, and foreign knick-knacks enabled them to live
on a level of affluence beyond the dream of Russians. Their free-
dom from the restraints imposed on the native population — their
right to speak their minds and dance fox-trots and tell political
anecdotes without glancing over their shoulders — also set them off
glamorously from Russians.

Small wonder that many of them developed grand-ducal com-

PICNICKING IN A GRAVEYARD 239

plexes. The hotels for foreigners were haunted by lovely women
all too willing to be seduced by a foreigner, almost any foreigner.
It was an open secret that most if not all these women worked
for the G.P.U. The rare exception was promptly drawn into the
secret service as soon as she formed a liaison. It was part of the
price she paid for the silk stockings, the three full meals a day,
the comfortable home that a foreigner could give her. Most of
these girls were the daughters of “former” people and therefore
outlaws. They could not or would not accept the rigors of the
new existence and thirsted for the counterfeit capitalist atmosphere
in which foreigners lived. At the core of their life was the glowing
dream of escape abroad. Sooner or later some foreigner — if not
her present bed-mate, then the next or the one after — would
marry her and transport her to the wonder world beyond the
barred doors of the Soviet Union.

For a few of them the dream came true. I was to run into them
sometimes in New York in subsequent years, a little wistful over
their lost fatherland and usually disappointed in the bourgeois
dreamland 5 those American husbands who seemed rich and unique
in Moscow proved very small and drab fry in their native settings.

These liaisons were not without their deep pathos. I knew many
a woman who had started an affair blithely at the behest of the
Foreign Department of the G.P.U. who came to admire or even
to love the man and suffered at the need to spy on her lover.
There were the times when wives arrived for a visit to their hus-
bands in Moscow and the traces of the Russian substitute had to
be hurriedly removed, the interrupted household resuming its
course when the wives had departed. A good many of these tem-
porary partnerships assumed a deceptively stable look. Friends
who were with the American Army of Occupation in Germany
tell me of the tragic separations from German girls which the end
of the occupation occasioned. Much of the same tragedy was en-
acted as members of the foreign army of technical experts in
Russia ended their service.

XV. Two Plus Two Equals Five

INDUSTRIALIZATION went forward with a great roar and
frenzied war whoops. Reports of building, factory output, new
collectives and state farms elbowed all other news off the front
pages. There was a constant beating of alarm drums: a breach on
one or another economic front, cries of sabotage, sudden arrests
and shooting of engineers and administrators. Notwithstanding,
plans were everywhere being fulfilled and even surpassed. New
energies and enthusiasms, new threats as well, were having their
effect. Food shortage was not yet at its acutest and the sapping of
physical strength and working morale through undernourishment
had not yet set in fully.

Optimism ran amuck. Every new statistical success gave another
justification for the coercive policies by which it was achieved.
Every setback was another stimulus to the same policies. The slo-
gan “The Five Year Plan in Four Years” was advanced, and the
magic symbols “5+1-4” and “2 + 2 = 5” were posted and shouted
throughout the land.

The formula 2 + 2 = 5 instantly riveted my attention. It
seemed to me at once bold and preposterous — the daring and the
paradox and the tragic absurdity of the Soviet scene, its mystical
simplicity, its defiance of logic, all reduced to nose-thumbing arith-
metic. . . . 2 + 2 = 5: in electric lights on Moscow housefronts,
in foot-high letters on billboards, spelled planned error, hyper-
bole, perverse optimism j something childishly headstrong and
stirringly imaginative. . . . 2 + 2 = 5: a slogan born in pre-
mature success, tobogganing toward horror and destined to end
up, lamely, as 2 + 2% = 5. . . .

The preliminary triumphs which evoked the slogan 2 + 2 = 5
were in many ways disastrous. They corroborated the taskmasters 5
inherited conviction that any miracles could be worked through the
sorcery of naked force. At the same time the first triumphs en-
couraged a costly revision of plans upward beyond the range of

240

TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS FIVE 24 1

reason. Under their pseudo-scientific exterior o£ charts and blue-
prints the planners were religious mystics in a trance of ardor.
Their optimism was hyperbolic. The maximal version of the Plan,
for instance, called for io million tons of pig iron in the fifth year.
They boosted it arbitrarily to 17 million. How far out of line this
was may be judged from the fact that actual production in the
final year was just over 6 million and that the goal for the end
of the Second Five Year Plan was to be only 16 million. The
coal schedule they boosted by fiat from the original 75 million
tons to 90 million — only 64 million were obtained. Right down
the line analogous increases were ordered, to be wiped out a little
sheepishly when the intoxication of the first victories wore off.

On the agrarian side the same excess of zeal prevailed. The
hope for the collectivization of one-tenth, then one-fifth, of the
peasantry by 1933 had seemed over-ambitious when announced
earlier in the year. Now it was ordained that fully one-half the
peasantry must be herded in collectives by 1932. With class war
as the persuasive weapon, wielded by the G.P.U. and the Red
Army where necessary, great peasant masses did rush blindly for
shelter under the collective roofs. From every village in the nation
came boastful accounts of peasants erasing the boundary lines be-
tween their private strips of land, pooling their animals and their
implements for joint cultivation. Always the boasts concluded with
grim references to kulaks and “kulak agents” who blocked col-
lectivization and must therefore be destroyed.

In great glee I cabled the statistical triumphs to the outside
world. The derision of capitalist economists when the “astronom-
ical figures” were first announced could now be thrown in their
teeth. Their own deepening economic crisis made these bourgeois
experts so much more vulnerable. Their self-esteem was at low
ebb.

But under the roar of industrialization life was increasingly
muted. The modest indulgences of the year before seemed long,
long ago and rather incredible. A full meal became life’s central
preoccupation for the mass of the population. Overhead the heavy
artillery thundered and spat fire 3 in the trenches of everyday ex-
istence people stepped cautiously, doused their lights and spoke in
whispers. The laconic announcements of executions lost their power
to interest, let alone move people. On a day when I had counted

242 hallelujah!

over forty executions in the morning papers — “speculators,” sabo-
teurs, opponents of collectivization, counter-revolutionary priests
— I asked a Russian acquaintance who was reading the same papers :

“Well, anything exciting in the news?”

He glanced through his Pravda again conscientiously and de-
cided, “No, nothing important.”

“Nothing important? Just count up the death sentences at
Novorossiisk, Krasnodar, Rostov — ”

“Oh, that!” and he smiled wryly.

Executions were no longer news. In 1928, a report of five or
ten kulaks put to death deserved a line or two in the day’s dis-
patches. From 1929 forward, we totaled the deaths during a week
or two w^eeks. The censorship permitted us to send whatever was
published but we could not hint that the published items were a
negligible part of the total. How many deaths we mentioned in
our cables depended largely on how many papers we read and
how carefully we counted them. Only the more important cases
were mentioned in the central press: hundreds of official shootings
were recorded in the provincial press or did not get published
at all.

A methodical German correspondent subscribed to several score
of local newspapers and employed several extra secretaries to read
them for interesting items. In weeks when our totals of executions,
based on Moscow’s press, came to a mere twenty or thirty, our
German colleague tallied a hundred or more. He was proud of
his advantage.

It was inevitable that the “war on superstition” should be in-
tensified at the same time, particularly in the villages where reli-
gion and the priesthood retained considerable influence. The God-
less Society had been lying low during Nep. It now roused itself
to the greatest campaign of its career. The drive for collectiviza-
tion became strongly anti-religious in character, since the priest,
deacons, and church-goers in most villages corresponded roughly
to the older, more conservative portion of the population. In
thousands of villages, local communists and Comsomols called
meetings which voted over the heads of the congregations to de-
molish churches, melt down the bells for scrap metal or turn
church buildings into granaries, lunchrooms, nurseries, libraries.
A semblance of popular consent was thus obtained. When brigades

TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS FIVE 243

arrived to remove the bells and the icons, they sometimes found
believers armed with sticks and pitchforks ready to defend their
church. The Red Army and G.P.U. troops in many instances were
summoned to crush these riots and the ring-leaders found them-
selves quickly enough in prison or before the firing squad. In the
environs of Moscow I saw bearded peasants and their women-folk
on their knees, wailing, crossing themselves and beating their fore-
heads on the ground as bells were being yanked down 5 younger
people jeered at them and mimicked their laments.

Anti-religious parades were organized throughout the country
for Easter Eve. Edward and Harriet Deuss, of the International
News Service, Billy and I tramped the muddy streets, from
crowded church to crowded church. Tens of thousands of young
and older people marched everywhere under flares and banners,
laughing, singing, cheering. As the parades passed a church, voices
rose to a shout, flares were brandished aloft, and the blasphemous
anti-religious tunes blanketed the sonorous chanting of the priests
and acolytes. The believers, walking round and round the church
in the traditional fashion, shielded their tapers a little more in-
tently, huddled closer to one another and pretended not to notice.
They did not look up to see the grotesque floats and cardboard
effigies of priests, deities, and kulaks in ludicrous postures.

At the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, toward which the
parades converged, an open-air motion picture screen was erected
at the very entrance. Anti-religious films were being shown on one
side of the door while thousands chanted “Christ has risen!” on
the other side. Many a young person hesitated uncertainly between
the free show outside and the solemn proceedings within.

Early in the morning of July 30, 1929, I was wakened by the
telephone. An American friend at the Grand Hotel informed me
in an excited voice that the celebrated Shrine of the Iberian Virgin,
visible from the hotel windows, had been demolished during the
night.

“I got up early,” he said, “and looked out of the window. I saw
a few old women weeping and wringing their hands. Then I no-
ticed that the gate to Red Square looked different. There was a
gaping hole where the Iberian Shrine had been.”

I dressed and rushed over to the scene. A few dozen people
stood around and stared in consternation at the spot where the

244 hallelujah!

blue-roofed shrine, studded with silver stars, and the miracle-
working painting of the Madonna had been, as if its disappear-
ance, too, were a species of miracle. I don’t know what they ex-
pected would happen. It was the most famous and the holiest
shrine in all of Russia. For twelve years the government had
hesitated to touch it, though it stood like a taunt and a challenge
in the very path of proletarian demonstrations, on the very thresh-
old of Red Square. The Godless had contented themselves with
a tablet on a nearby wall, within view of those who made pilgrim-
ages to the shrine, reading: “Religion is the opiate of the people.”
Now, without warning, the Iberian Virgin had been removed and
thrown into the storehouse of a small church in another district,
and her shrine destroyed. The Godless, keyed up by this supreme
gesture of their defiance, were a little startled by their own
audacity.

For three or four days Moscow buzzed with talk of the shrine.
Legends about it coursed through all of Russia. Then it was for-
gotten. No clearer demonstration of the general indifference to
religion and the helplessness of the dwindling number of believers
could have been given. Russians were infinitely more concerned
with the loss of their strips of private land and other economic
possessions than the demolition of their icons.

The renewed drive against religion drew more attention abroad
than any other phase of Stalin’s great offensive. Inside Russia it
was a very minor note in the picture, the business of a handful
of fanatic Godless and a small sector of the believers.

2

My Russian friends and closer acquaintances were most of them
writers, actors, dancers, technicians. I saw a good deal of the im-
pact of the mounting difficulties of living through their effect on
these people. The promises of higher living standards meticulously
oudined in the original plan were never so much as mentioned
now. Human destiny seemed reduced to impersonal figures and
skeleton percentages. Amusement and the simple amenities of life
were politically immoral. The theater and literature took on a
more somber, desperate tinge — became, in fact, as coldly abstract
as the graphs and percentages on the front pages. Plays carried

TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS FIVE 245

over from the Nep period, if they emphasized private instead of
social emotion, were for the most part stamped out. The new plays
were machine-made rites of machine worship. The plaintive and
mischievous folk music smacked too much of the introspective,
soul-searching past and the new era would have none of it. It
became practically counter-revolutionary to sing it or to play it
on the accordion. The vigorous, self-confident revolutionary tunes
had right of way 3 if the population thirsted for its ancient melo-
dies, so much the worse for their backward gullets! Even Tchai-
kovsky was kicked out as too “sentimental.”

The depredations of know-nothing fanaticism in the domains
of culture occupied a large place in my personal view of the
Soviet landscape. My own interests and contacts were dispropor-
tionately in those areas of Russian life. The increase of literacy
among the Uzbeks or Samoyeds was automatically bracketed in
my mind with the rapid deterioration of literary and journalistic
standards ; reading was not an abstract value but related to the
books and papers available to the newly literate. I could not help
viewing those figures on enlarged cinema and theatrical facilities
for remoter towns in direct relation to the type of pictures and
plays permitted by the censors.

But the afflictions in the cultural domains ran truly parallel with
conditions in most other departments of life. Under the dictator-
ship of the proletariat, existence is so integrated that close obser-
vation of one sector gives an accurate clew to all the rest, just as
the pulse may be taken on any vein as an index to the condition
of the whole body.

The novelist, Boris Pilnyak, was singled out for an organized
attack on the literary front. He had been overtaken by the worst
disaster that can befall a Soviet writer: he was being praised by
the wrong people abroad. Accidentally the manuscript of his story
Mahogany had gotten to Berlin and been published there before
it was issued in Moscow. It was a too realistic description of the
difficulties and desperations of life in a Soviet provincial town, and
the Russian emigre press was moved to say nice things about it.
No sooner had one Soviet paper given the signal, therefore, than
the entire press and the whole writing fraternity converged on
Pilnyak in a yelping pack.

The politicians of literature, organized in RAPP (Association

246 HALLELUJAH !

of Proletarian Writers) led the onslaught. Every writer with an
active will to survive was obliged in self-defense to spit at Pilnyak.
All but a few did and the conspicuous abstension of the intrepid
few marked them as “class enemies.” Neither the content nor the
quality of the story in question mattered. Few of those who barked
angrily had even read it; their synthetic indignation was distinctly
second-hand. Ultimately the self-same story, only slightly medi-
cated, was woven into the novel The Volga Flows to the Caspian
Sea and was praised by the very critics who now snarled at the
author.

RAPP (in English the name is singularly appropriate) had set
out to achieve “ the seizure of power in literature.” The narrow
orthodoxy of this period made that objective all too easy. Accord-
ing to its catechism it was not enough for an artist to approve and
celebrate the communist goal; he must devote himself to the pre-
scribed details of the immediate economic and political methods
for reaching that goal. Indeed, emphasis on the freedom and
beauty to come was in RAPP’s opinion a waste of artistic energy
that should be invested in practical tasks. “Enough of the sky and
the strangeness of things! Give us more plain nails!” the RAPP
poet Bezimensky shrieked. The artist who dared to look at the
sky and betrayed an awareness of the strangeness of things, who
could not conceal his intuitive sense of life and human destiny as
larger than the plain nails, was a cultural kulak. It did not suffice
that he admitted the importance of plain nails if he dared hint
that the sky was studded with stars.

At the head of RAPP, and by that token the Stalin of Soviet
culture, was a certain Leopold Auerbach,* whose literary style,
according to Max Eastman, “has that rare and generous quality
that you sometimes find in a business-college sophomore studying
to become a publicity writer for a scenic railway.” That good-
natured pedestrian pedant, Sergei Dinamov, was raised to editor-
ship of the all-powerful Literary Gazette. Third-rate journalists
with a talent for toe-licking and a good memory for the latest
official “theses” became the tsars in every branch of creative art.

I met Pilnyak about this time. A big, blond, unwieldy fellow,
with a huge smile and a huge appetite for wine, women, and life.

* Arrested for “counterrevolution” and embezzlement in 1937.

TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS FIVE 247

Though he had Volga German blood in his veins, he was Russian
in a salty elemental way — one of those who could scarcely breathe,
let alone write, except on and about his native soil. I came to
know many others of this stamp, whom neither changing govern-
ments nor social systems could alienate from Russia, who pre-
ferred servitude in Siberia to freedom in a foreign land. Pilnyak,
talented and naive, with a zest for living joined to a disdain for
life, seemed to me a personification of Russia. It may explain why
he was kept hopping by the powers-that-be between extravagant
adulation and no less extravagant denunciation, sometimes the two
simultaneously.

The attack on Pilnyak was a warning that the time for half-
loyalties was over. Novelists, poets, playwrights, even musicians
and painters, must devote themselves specifically to the advance-
ment of the Five Year Plan or be branded outlaws. A few pre-
ferred to stop writing, painting and composing 5 the rest rushed
for the proletarian bandwagon.

The last spark of Moscow’s literary bohemianism expired. Dom
Gertsena, the Artists’ Club, and other gathering places of the
creative intelligentsia turned into drab, hushed restaurants. The
spirited Pava no longer pounded the piano, except in private under
safe auspices. She taught Billy her favorite songs, and her vibrant
voice echoed through our remodeled stable.

Stories or poems which did not raucously celebrate the glories
of industrialization, iron discipline, death to class enemies, could
no longer find publication. The agitka y or crude propaganda work,
until then recognized as a useful form but treated a little con-
descendingly, now became the prescribed and exclusive literary
fare. Those who could not or would not manage it might as well
throw away their pens.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, a burly bellowing fellow who had trav-
eled all the way from his pre-war futuristic poetry to the blood-
and-iron of proletarian poetry, popularized the phrase a “social
order” for his fellow-writers. He laughed at “inspiration” and
“moods” and introspection. A “social order” from the Communist
Party was all the inspiration that a Soviet poet required. There
was no place for dreamers and spinners of images, he insisted,
poetry must be pounded out with sledge-hammers and ironed into
shape with tractors. Mayakovsky dressed and swaggered like a

248 HALLELUJAH !

class-conscious afache; he wrote magnificent lines in praise o£ the
death-dealing G.P.U. and did not cavil about applying his talent
to celebrate Soviet mineral water or Soviet loans. But the swagger
and the noise were a pathetic attempt to shout down his genuine
poetic instinct.

“Social orders” sent bewildered authors scurrying to electric
stations, factories, collective farms, scientific expeditions, tasting the
new Soviet life like literary adolescents. They exchanged their
inspirations for notebooks and painfully concocted dull books and
plays ordered by trusts and commissions. Pilnyak himself went off
to Central Asia to retrieve political respectability by writing about
the Five Year Plan in that part of the country. Literary mediocrity
had never in human history touched such heights of power or
such depths of drabness.

It was at this time that the more fanatical notions of “collective
authorship” were put forward. Any collective of workers, the
theory ran, could turn out a literary masterpiece if it made the
effort. A miner could do a masterpiece about mining, a collective
farmer about farm life. Genius and natural talents were outmoded
inventions of individualist bourgeois exploiters. Down with the
pretensions of artists! The purpose of evoking latent talent in
simple workers and peasants was sound enough, but it was vitiated
by a disdain for talent as such and a tendency to eulogize trashy
manuscripts if they were grubby with proletarian fingerprints and
boldly ungrammatical. The theory did not go much farther than
stupid fulmination. But it was indicative of the revolt against cul-
ture and intelligence: part of the same hatred of the better-edu-
cated and more sensitive human beings which was manifest in the
persecution of engineers, arrests of professors and scientists, baiting
of aged Academicians.

There arose a vogue for simon-pure collectivism in the more
idealistic and optimistic strata of the population. Real communism
was presumably around the corner. Groups of workers in factories
and students in their barracks anticipated its arrival by forming
voluntary collectives. They pooled their earnings and drew from
the common fund according to their needs. Entire factories in some
instances decided to merge their incomes and equalize wages. In
the plans for new housing certain ideologically correct architects
disdained the old-fashioned individual kitchen, bathroom, or nur-

TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS FIVE 249

sery: eating, hygiene, and the rearing of children would be a
communal matter. Proposals for new cities in which children would
be brought up by the community were made in all seriousness and
discussions unfolded as to the extent parents might safely be per-
mitted to maintain contact with their offspring.

Few of these things went beyond the theoretical stage or touched
more than a fevered few in the population. These ideas, however,
are clews to the illusions of the moment. The communist mil-
lennium seemed to a few faithful just over the horizon — but they
were the few who wielded the power of the state and could en-
force their distortions upon a sixth part of the globe. It was a
mood which stopped at nothing to attain its objectives. Something
of religious hysteria — the hysteria of a Mohammedan army fight-
ing infidels — was in it.

The news of the Wall Street crash and the capitalist Depression
that it ushered in came as confirmation of the communist prog-
nosis. The capitalist structure was tottering. Against the background
of mounting unemployment, crashing banks, riots and doles, the
Soviet effort gained dramatic significance. The press did not con-
ceal its glee. It jeered at the famous American prosperity and the
vaunted capitalist “stabilization.” It ridiculed those communists
who had doubted that world revolution was “the order of the
day.”

Practically, the depression hit Russia as hard as the rest of the
world. Its foreign trade, an important element in the Five Year
Plan, was undermined. The prices of machinery it imported went
down, but the prices on its exports sank much faster. Lack of
“valuta,” foreign capital, became the greatest stumbling block on
the road to industrialization and internal inflation assumed disas-
trous proportions. But psychologically and politically, the depres-
sion had its uses. It gave the Kremlin new confidence. It evoked
a cocky, boastful, derisive attitude toward the outside world which
made Russia impervious to foreign criticism and more smugly self-
righteous than ever in its ruthlessness.

XVI. The War Nobody Knew

DURING most o£ that year of 1929, the Red Army fought a
war against the Chinese in Manchuria in defense of the Soviet
Union’s half-interest in the Chinese-Eastern Railway. The provo-
cations on both sides were more than ample, and the fighting was
real enough, but the hostilities were never dignified by the official
designation of war. Like the Japanese invasion of Manchuria sev-
eral years later, and the Italian attack on Ethiopia later still, the
Soviet punitive operations in China were conducted without a
formal declaration of war.

It began early in spring with Chinese charges that Russia was
using the railroad personnel and railroad funds for communist
propaganda in Manchuria. Toward the end of May, the Man-
churians raided the Soviet consulate at Harbin in search of docu-
mentary proof of what everyone in Moscow assumed to be true:
that an insurrectionary movement under Feng Hu-Siang, the so-
called “Christian General,” had Soviet encouragement. Soviet offi-
cials and citizens were arrested. In a few thrusts in the following
months the Chinese ousted Russians from the railroad and other
strategic economic positions, arresting thousands in the process.

Red Army units were mobilized $ one after another classes of
reserves were called to the colors 5 and a Special Far Eastern
Army was created. That army remained on a permanent footing,
vastly strengthened with every year and perhaps destined ulti-
mately to test Soviet strength against Japan. General Bluecher,
the tall, soldierly fighter whose prowess was a by- word in his coun-
try, was placed in command. Several years before, the same
Bluecher, under the nom de guerre of General Galen, had been
the mysterious Russian genius behind the victorious northward
march of the Kuomintang revolutionary armies in China. He had
guided the hand of a young half-literate peasant soldier who was
now virtual dictator of Nationalist China, the same Chiang Kai-
shek who now protested to the world against Soviet entry into

250

THE WAR NOBODY KNEW 2 $ I

Manchuria. General Bluecher-Galen’s place at the head of the
invading Red troops was a startling measure of the changes
wrought by a few years. The Chinese had a healthy respect for
this Russian’s skill and strength when he started. That respect
was deepened by the end of the year.

At first the Soviet citizenry was kept apprised of developments
and in a state of half-hearted resentment against “Chinese and
White Russian bandits.” Then the war was all but forgotten, both
in Russia and in the rest of the world. Serious enough in terms
of casualties and political consequences, it remains to this day the
war nobody knew.

In July, Moscow sent an ultimatum to China. Millions of Rus-
sians responded quickly and noisily to the Party’s order for mass
demonstrations against the violation of Soviet rights in China. In
Moscow at least half a million men and women paraded past the
Chinese Legation building, shouting insults against the Chinese
bandits and their White Russian hirelings. After the parades the
public all but forgot the whole business. By the time the war was
actually under way, only faint echoes reached the people, busy
with more pressing matters like shock brigading, rations, and class
war in the peasant regions.

On the night when China’s answer to the ultimatum was due,
at the end of July, a great many of Moscow’s resident Americans,
including all the correspondents, were at a gay party in the pala-
tial home of the Hammers in honor of some members of the dele-
gation of so-called American business-men. The house was loud
and gay this night, a long table sagged under its weight of rich
foods, and the vodka flowed generously.

But through the noise the correspondents listened for the ring
of the telephone that would call us to the Press Department for
news of China’s answer. We did not get it until 2:30 a.m. and
learned to our distress that Tass, the official news agency, had
transmitted the Chinese reply to the whole world by wire three
hours before it was released to us in Moscow. The chain of
agencies allied with Tass — the Associated Press in America, Wolff
in Germany, Reuters in England, etc. — were well content with
their scoop, but the rest of the foreign press corps were indignant.
To make things worse for myself and others who were “beaten,”
Negley Farson wrote for his paper a fulsome description of the

252 hallelujah!

Hammer party which we attended. Unintentionally he created the
false impression that we had neglected our duty in order to attend
this lively gathering. I heard from my home office on the matter,
as did others.

I obtained the first and only interview on the Manchurian situ-
ation with the Assistant Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Karakhan,*
by way of smoothing my own ruffled feathers. But the bureau-
cratic news policy dominated by Tass remained unaltered. A hun-
dred times I tried to make the Press Department officials see
the wisdom of establishing a second news channel through which
those correspondents not in the ring of the world’s official agencies
might get their information. Tass would thereby carry out its
contractual obligations to its official news allies, while the rest of us
competed on equal terms. The Press Department agreed, talked
of the reforms to come, but, Russian-fashion, nothing happened.

The Chinese-Eastern matter had earlier precipitated me into
an acrimonious passage at arms with the censors. I had received
an urgent inquiry from New York about the Soviet “reaction” to
the raid of its Harbin consulate. It was the first I had heard about
the event: news is too closely guarded in the U.S.S.R. I wrote a
dispatch indicating that the affair was still unknown to Moscow
outside of official circles. I took it to the Foreign Office for the
needed censor’s signature. Arriving at the Press Department, how-
ever, I was informed that Mr. Rothstein, the only censor on hand,
was “in conference.” I waited. Waiting in the outer room of the
censorship division was the correspondents’ principal and most
exasperating job in Moscow. We resented the lackadaisical dis-
regard of time and general inefficiency of the process even more
than the censorship itself. A hundred times I heard American,
French, German newspapermen with world-wide reputations
threaten that they wouldn’t stand being kept waiting like office boys
while the censors finished their tea-drinking. But they continued
to stand it; there was nothing intentional about the insulting pro-
cedure, just routine procrastination. In any case, there I was wait-
ing for Mr. Rothstein while the world waited for some word on
the Harbin developments out of Russia.

At quarter-hour intervals I tried to break into Mr. Rothstein’s

* Executed in December, 1937.

THE WAR NOBODY KNEW

253

sanctum, to be informed with a shrug that he was still in con-
ference. At the end of an hour I wrote out a cable reading approxi-
mately as follows (I quote from memory) :

An embargo on all outgoing news was instituted in Russia today.
Correspondents arriving at the Press Department of the Foreign Office
found that the censorship facilities, without which news cannot possibly
be sent, were mysteriously shut down. There was no indication whether
or when the embargo might be lifted, as no official comment on the
sensational action could be obtained. Well-informed quarters assume
that only some internal or foreign crisis of great seriousness could have
prompted the Foreign Office to isolate the nation in this fashion with-
out warning.

I took the dispatch — which I had no intention of sending, of
course — to the secretary outside Mr. Rothstein’s door.

“Please place this message before Mr. Rothstein, conference or
no conference,” I said grimly.

“But—”

“There are no buts. This is most urgent, just do what you’re
told.”

Fifteen seconds later I was in Mr. Rothstein’s office. He had
apparently been conferring with himself. No one else was present
or had come out of his office. His temper, having read my make-
believe message, was a match for my own. The first hostilities in
the Sino-Russian war occurred there and then. My relations with
the Press Department were strained for a while — every correspon-
dent went through these “mad” spells periodically, then submitted
helplessly to the pervading inefficiency and delay which neither his
indignation nor anything else could change in the slightest.

Diplomatic relations with China were broken. By September,
large Red forces, supported by war planes and tanks, were push-
ing into Manchuria. By the end of November, the Chinese had
been completely routed, many Manchurian towns were demolished
and Russia was in control of northern Manchuria. Just when the
Chinese capitulated and the fighting ceased, Secretary of State
Stimson in Washington decided to invoke the Kellogg Pact to
prevent the war that had already been fought to a finish. This
fiasco in itself indicated how little the world knew about what was
happening in Manchuria. The Soviet press jeered at “Stimson s

2 54 HALLELUJAH !

belated and uncalled-for intervention.” Litvinov sent a stinging
reply which American public opinion considered insulting and there
was a general feeling even among communists that Litvinov’s
genius for offensive satire for once had outweighed his diplomatic
shrewdness. What might have been an opening wedge for Soviet-
American understanding, Litvinov angrily converted into another
barrier.

Suddenly the world was excited by the war it had ignored.
The Moscow reporters were driven to the edge of apoplexy by
the futile effort to obtain news of the peace negotiations started in
Khabarovsk. Secrecy bred sensational rumors. Refusal to disclose
the extent or cost of operations or the terms of settlement kept
us hopping. But little as we knew, the general public knew less.
The peace, like the war, did not touch a population on the eve
of a much greater and more terrible war: the policy of “liquidation
of the kulaks as a class” had just been promulgated by Stalin.

“The masses and the communist rank and file have been kept
in far greater ignorance than even the foreign press,” a New York
Times dispatch out of Moscow declared. Then the correspondent
added: “Yet there was no grumbling or demands for news. Well
may the communists boast of the discipline which stood such a
test.”

Since that correspondent is not wholly naive, it may be assumed
that he had his tongue in his cheek in putting this curious inter-
pretation upon the apathy and meekness of the communists and
the masses. No one boasted of this discipline except the New
York Times. Silent acceptance of accomplished facts without
“grumbling or demands for news” by this time seemed to me no
longer novel enough to be worth cabling as news.

2

We shared a dacha that summer with Rachelle Ossipovna and
her family at Silver Forests, at the northernmost end of the Mos-
cow street car system. The gleaming birch woods of this popular
suburb are thickly sown with summer cottages owned by city
people. In addition, local peasants let their dilapidated huts,
trimmed with wood embroidery, at a price that enabled them to
live through the winter. Only those in the higher brackets of

THE WAR NOBODY KNEW 255

earning power could afford the traditional summer transfer to a
dacha y so that our neighbors were the more privileged officials,
better-paid technicians, writers and the like. Rachelle’s entourage
of obscure celebrities from the theaters and concert halls enlivened
the summer months of 1929.

The presence of an American family in their midst was slightly
disconcerting to the middle-class Soviet denizens of Silver Forests.
Frequently they saw tourist automobiles struggle through the nar-
row lanes to our door, bringing American friends in their dazzling
elegance of sport clothes, cameras, and new embroidered Russian
blouses. Our guests deepened that dangerous but fascinating bour-
geois atmosphere which surrounded foreigners. But curiosity some-
times conquered discretion and a good many of the dacha boarders
ventured into our more carefree and better-supplied circle.

Rachelle’s hospitable samovar always sang a welcome and her
desperate yearning for the vanished glamor of her Petrograd
past drew the gayer young dancers and poets and opera hopefuls
to our lawn. Her bald-headed, near-sighted husband wandered in
meek embarrassment among the young people, cornering me every
so often to tell the latest political joke for a third time that day or
to beat me again at chess. There were soft evenings when Billy
paid for the Russians 5 folk songs with the St . Louis Blues or
Negro spirituals or I.W.W hymns. There were boisterous after-
noons of swimming and leap-frog in the Moscow River. The con-
ventions required that we dress and undress in full view of every-
one on the crowded beach: walking from the house to the river
in a bathing suit or even a bathrobe was shockingly indecent. Like
the Russians we soaped ourselves and scrubbed one another’s back
on the river’s edge.

Endlessly we were questioned about American skyscrapers, cow-
boys and Indians, J. P. Morgan and Rockefeller. The American
tourists whom we invited to the dacha became the focal points of
local interest, their clothes and private biographies frankly investi-
gated and commented upon. It was the nearest most of those visi-
tors came to real Russians out of earshot of their guides. The
softer country atmosphere melted away a little of the fear that
crusted Russian minds and we came closer to our neighbors than
we could in the city.

When we left for a European vacation at the end of the sum-

256 hallelujah!

mer we carried long lists of commissions from Russian friends and
resident Americans. These included medicines, corsets, leberwurst,
garters, caps, eye-glasses, dance records, nails, violin strings, the
thousand and one things for which Russia yearned. Like all for-
eigners we went with empty suitcases to return with full ones,
ready to do battle with the customs officials in defense of the
miscellany of gifts.

Throughout our stay in Berlin or Paris or Vienna. the thought
of those commissions was a dead weight on our conscience. Some-
how the bothersome purchases were always postponed to tomor-
row in the thrill of tasting capitalist excitements after a six months’
absence. That meant frenzied shopping at the last moment and
the guilty fear that we had overlooked someone’s dramatic plea
for hairp ins and someone else’s meek hope of a recent fashion
magazine. Usually we forgot who asked for what. Now what was
it Anna Pavlovna was so intent on having, silk stockings or castor
oil? No, the stockings are for Lyev Borisovich— probably for that
new ballerina of his — and the castor oil is for the director of the
building cooperative. What could it have been we promised poor
Anna Pavlovna? The Americans’ requests for breakfast foods,
ketchup, lemons or pancake flour were particularly annoying.

Back in Moscow, the problem of distributing the gifts involved
a month’s travail. The films for a Pravda reporter proved to be
the wrong size and the leberwurst got badly tangled with the nails.
Lyev Borisovich had in the meantime been arrested and we dared
not guess whether he had intended the lipstick for his wife or his
girl friends. Lida had suddenly become frightened of her bour-
geois contacts and failed to claim that ten-cent bracelet; but just
after we had presented it to someone else, she arrived surrepti-
tiously to collect it. That American engineer was deeply offended
because we had forgotten the chocolate bars.

In the autumn the problem of Genie’s schooling became more
pressing. The ordinary kindergartens and schools were badly over-
crowded. In the previous year, we were aware, they had been
closed down nearly half the time because of epidemic illnesses.
Nevertheless we visited a few. If we could find one general school
with a clean toilet, we would chance sending her there. We could
not find it. The only hope was to have her admitted to one of
the special kindergartens organized by the more important insti-

THE WAR NOBODY KNEW 257

tutions for the children of their own employees. The Foreign
Office had one of the best, and there we applied. The application
created a serious diplomatic situation. Through friends we dis-
covered the turmoil we had started. It was slightly inconvenient
to refuse a simple favor to an American correspondent, a “friendly”
one at that. On the other hand, could the dictatorship of the pro-
letariat risk the presence of a “bourgeois element” in its unde-
filed school?

For about a week Mr. Rothstein stalled and cleared his throat.
Finally he informed us regretfully that while the Foreign Office
would be delighted to give a proletarian education to my daugh-
ter, it was unfortunately overcrowded, etc., etc. In franker quar-
ters I was informed that Genie was considered undesirable as a
“bourgeois element” — at the age of six and a half! A few weeks
later, despite the overcrowding, the two children of Louis Fischer
were admitted to this school. Sins of the fathers! In the end we
found a disfranchised pre-revolutionary teacher who gratefully
accepted the tutelage of Genie and the children of a Soviet physi-
cian as a private kindergarten group.

3

Moscow was brightened for us for a week in November by the
arrival of the little Napoleon of American journalism, Roy W.
Howard. The Press Department officials who were with me to
meet him, awed by his reputation, stared in consternation at the
small, chirping newspaper magnate in his natty clothes and loud
shirt: like a bright Christmas package from another world as he
stepped off the Trans-Siberian. It was my function as one of his
minions to act as guide and mentor on matters Soviet. His in-
telligent curiosity and bubbling sense of fun turned the chore into
a holiday.

The highly optimistic views of Russian affairs which he brought
back to America were a fairly accurate measure of my own at-
titudes at the time. If visiting communists carried back wry re-
ports of my bourgeois defections, visiting capitalists were fortified
in their suspicion that the United Press was represented by an em-
phatic admirer of the Soviets.

258 hallelujah!

Frazier Hunt — “Spike” after the first fifteen minutes hap-
pened to be in Moscow at the same time as Howard on an as-
signment for the Hearst organization. They were both at the
Hotel Savoy. I phoned down and told Spike what the Trans-
Siberian had brought out of Japan. In a few minutes he came
crashing through like a playful tornado, over six feet of ebullient
vitality, swept Howard into his long arms and swung him around
the room over the publisher’s contralto protests. It was a loud
and memorable reunion. George Slocombe has described Spike as
the only American correspondent who is not cynical; he combines,
indeed, the technique of a veteran with the wide-eyed roman-
tics of a cub reporter on his first big fire.

Billy’s talents as a cook shone with a special incandescence in
the land of rations. Russia’s past reputation for good cooking
rested largely on the French chefs employed in the best homes
and hotels. The Lyons table achieved a wide if unideological
fame. Sojourners of the extreme Left, having enjoyed thoroughly
one of Billy’s meals, were convinced that anyone who fed his
guests so well must be lacking in his political morals — revolu-
tion like good medicine should be hard to swallow.

Except for the lack of fresh vegetables and fruits, the for-
eigners’ food problem was not a serious one. Technically our pur-
chases in the diplomats’ shop were limited to definite though
generous amounts, to prevent us from feeding needy Russian
friends. In practice these limits were often stretched. There was
not one foreigner in Moscow who did not help a few of his Rus-
sian acquaintances with an occasional pound of sugar, butter,
potatoes, or a package of cigarettes. The cigarette shortage hit
the country almost as hard as the lack of bread and meat. Rus-
sians are inveterate smokers. People stopped strangers on the
street to beg a puff or two. Ragged boys hawked a few dirty
cigarettes, probably stolen somewhere, at fancy prices.

For all its inconveniences, life was full to overflowing for a
correspondent in intimate touch with the news. The tension of
existence invested the simplest routine of daily affairs with new
emotional dimensions. The country lived on the brink of novelty,
in a state of nervous expectancy: a new decree, a new intonation
in Stalin’s latest speech, might alter the quality of life for a him-

THE WAR NOBODY KNEW 2^9

dred million people. Elsewhere in the world there was an in-
trinsic and discernible logic in events. Changes flowed from con-
ditions, major social calamities grew out of causes that had ripened
slowly. In the Russia of this epoch the relationship between
cause and effect seemed to have been suspended, since everything
except the weather depended on the arbitrary will of the rulers.

Whatever this may have meant in terms of fear, hope and un-
certainty to the Soviet masses, it provided an extraordinary spec-
tacle for an outsider whose duty it was to observe the process 3
not always a pleasant spectacle, but always epic in scope. The
sheer scale of Russian events stirred the imagination. Where death
sentences were spoken of in dozens elsewhere, they were reckoned
in hundreds here. Where political prisoners and exiles in Italy
or France or Rumania were reckoned by the hundred, they must
be counted here by the hundred thousand. In estimating the im-
mediate effects of new policies or procedures, the normal unit of
calculation was a million families.

And I never ceased to marvel at the direct and instantaneous
impact of the governing will upon individuals. An unwonted
warmth would come into people’s voices, a fresh springiness to
their step, and I knew that the change was derived from a more
liberal decree published that very day. Or a deeper tone of
gloom and worry clouded people’s expression, and I knew as
surely as if it had been written in words on their foreheads that
another purge of offices and apartment houses had been ordered.
The arrival of a shipment of herrings or potatoes, the opening of
a few new shops, affected the temper of the Soviet capital as only
the declaration or ending of wars affected other capitals.

Sometimes I visualized the Russian population as a huge ant-
hill, with Stalin poking a stick into its center. Every casual prod-
ding destroyed the contours of life for a few more million of the
insects. Perhaps I came to see the process from the ant’s lowly
vantage point rather than Stalin’s. It was about this time that
in a letter to an American friend I coined an aphorism which
explained my state of mind even if it explained nothing about
Russia.

“It is not pleasant,” I wrote, “to watch men driven like sheep,
even if they’re being driven to heaven.”

260 hallelujah!

The initial two years of my assignment in Utopia had taken
the starch out of my Soviet enthusiasms. I still retained most of
them, but they were wilted and drooping. I was essentially un-
happy and uncomfortable in the realization that, for all I could
do to drive them back to their subterranean lairs, fundamental
doubts were rising to the surface of my consciousness.

BOOK 3

DOUBT

I. Stalin LauncHes a Slogan

THE gnawing ambition o£ every correspondent, the far-off beacon
of hope by which he steered his life, professionally speaking, was
an interview with Joseph Stalin. Few had troubled to press him
for this boon in the first years of the Soviet universe, when he
moved vaguely in the haze around major planets like Lenin,
Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Dzherzhinsky. After Lenin’s death, Stalin’s
star rose quickly in the political heavens, but he was still, in for-
eign eyes at least, one of many. During this period a Japanese
correspondent succeeded in interviewing him. Stalin said to him
— and the saying has become celebrated — “I, too, am an Asiatic.”
By 1929, he was dictator in all but name, the sun around which
the Soviet universe revolved, and the most coveted object of in-
terviewers among the great of this earth.

The more stubbornly he denied himself, the more desirable he
seemed. Journalists and publishers of world repute knocked at
the Kremlin gates until their knuckles bled but they could not
reach him. This inaccessibility passed the comprehension of Ameri-
can editors. At regular intervals I received instructions to ob-
tain “Stalin’s reaction” to some national or international event. All
other American correspondents received analogous orders. We
learned to ignore them. We stopped trying to convince our distant
editors that Stalin was the one exception. He could be snared by
neither flattery nor threats, neither favors nor trickery.

I decided one evening to try oblique insult.

At the moment it seemed pure inspiration. In sober fact my
impertinence grew unconsciously out of a conversation with a
Soviet official weeks before. He had known Stalin before his ascent
to glory, both before and after the revolution. The audacity that
resides in a flagon of vodka where lemon peel shavings drift like
seaweed enabled him to utter the ineffable name.

“Stalin ” he said meditatively, “has one weakness. His Achilles’

263

DOUBT

264

heel. That’s his vanity. He may pretend to be annoyed with the
hallelujahs of praise, but he does nothing to stop them. He al-
lows himself to be convinced too readily that the genuflecting
is politically useful. He reacts to the mildest slight on his dig-
nity as though it were an electric shock.”

Some part of my mind must have caught the seed of an idea
in that estimate. Insult is the antithesis of flattery and there-
fore “dialectically” its consort. Of flattery Stalin had an abundance
beyond my strength to add, so why not its Hegelian mate? Thus
the seed sprouted and the fruit it bore was a letter in which I
hinted very broadly at the popular view of Stalin as a crafty,
merciless recluse, peremptory and sour, awful in his boundless
will to power. Maybe in my subconscious mind, where everyday
things throw their grotesque shadows, I really gave some credence
to this picture of him as the ogre-like dictator of folk-lore. In any
event, I wrote him in part:

An enormous amount of nonsense about you has been spread
throughout the world. Some through ill will, others through ignorance,
have depicted you as a taciturn recluse hiding behind the Kremlin walls,
unapproachable and scarcely human. Indeed, I saw one item in the
press insisting that you did not exist at all, that you were a mere fig-
ment of Bolshevik imagination.

My letter implied that there might be some truth in these
insinuations. The only sure way to disprove and dissipate such
notions, I urged him, was to break his silence by receiving the
United Press correspondent. Having dispatched this bit of lop-
sided logic, I waited for the thunder and the lightning of divine
wrath. Several days later a messenger came to Clean Ponds Boule-
vard bearing a large envelope decorated with a great wax seal.
Inside were a few typewritten lines in Russian on a half-sheet
of white paper, without so much as a letterhead, signed in red
ink in the small neat handwriting of the dictator. The letter
read:

I am sorry that I cannot at the present time grant your request for
an interview. Motives: (a) interviews do not destroy legends but rather
create an unhealthy atmosphere for new sensations and legends; (b)
I have not at the moment free time for an interview.

STALIN LAUNCHES A SLOGAN 265

I ask your pardon for the delay of the answer. There is a lot of
work and the matter lay awaiting an opportunity for answering.

Respectfully yours,

J. Stalin.

My first impulse was to publish the letter and the reply. Any
direct word from Stalin was a “story” well worth the cable tolls.
His opinion of interviews as a class was news. Stalin’s lieutenants,
I learned subsequently, were astonished that I did not exploit
this correspondence. I was astonished myself, if the truth be told.
Such restraint is not in my journalistic nature. But I told neither
my editors nor my friends about the exchange of amenities.

Instead, I ignored section (a) of his “motives” as a philosophi-
cal generalization and accepted section (b) as a concrete undertaking
to receive me when he could spare the time. Since pressure of other
business prevented him from giving me an interview “at the mo-
ment,” I wrote in thanking him for the prompt reply, I would
wait patiently until the pressure eased. A month later I sent an-
other letter referring to his “promise” and expressing the hope
that he would soon find the time to keep it. Periodically I plagued
him thus with a gentle reminder of this tangential “promise” I
had read into his refusal.

The figure of Stalin expanded on the nation’s mind. It grew
Gargantuan and more than a little sphinx-like, a symbol more than
a man. The ether trembled at the mention of his name and it
seemed overwhelmingly strange that the exalted essence should
have not only a face but a distinct mustache.

Twice each year, on May 1 and November 7, the Moscow masses
saw him flittingly through a blur of excitement as they swung
past Lenin’s tomb: a robust, large-featured, typically Caucasian
person in a military great-coat, a flat-visored military hat, a cer-
tain sculptured stolidity in his calm pose. There was something
monumental in the very drape of Stalin’s clothes. But he never
spoke in public except behind the barred doors of special Party
and technical conferences. Not once had his voice, tinged with
the familiar Georgian accent, been heard over the radio. Only
very infrequently did he show up in the news-reels. Even his
photographs were few and standardized.

The rarity of his public statements weighted his every carefully

DOUBT

266

edited word with a power such as Napoleon’s or Lenin’s or Mus-
solini’s never carried. Lenin’s pronouncements had been the basis
for discussion. Stalin’s were the basis for obedience. Coincident
with the November holidays, he released a signed article entitled
“The Year of the Great Break.” It both reflected and deepened the
somber tone of the national life. Its every sentence became a
war cry. Sycophants and bigots read into it a wisdom beyond the
compass of a merely mortal mind.

Six weeks later came a nation-wide display of worship for Stalin
such as no tsar or emperor had ever been vouchsafed. The vozhd
was fifty years old on December 21, 1929, and the birthday was
made the occasion for a demonstration of servility, flattery, and a
sort of religious propitiation. Russians excel in the arts of en-
thusiastic self-abasement. There was the flavor of the Arabian
Nights in the flummery that inundated the land. To an alien ear
it sounded fantastic. The reams of “greetings” dripped with
honeyed panegyric in the extravagant style of courtiers in bad
novels. Every politician and litterateur whose name meant any-
thing to the public — including yesterday’s Oppositionist exiles —
rummaged in his memory for stories to set off the courage, in-
fallible sagacity, and leadership of Stalin.

There was little of simple affection in the demonstration, almost
nothing to hint that the distant object of adulation was of flesh
and blood. Though they called him Comrade, this Stalin was
as far-off and unimaginably mysterious to the simple Russians
as the tsars before him had been. The tsars, too, were called “little
father.” Deity is ever extolled in the familiar “thou.” In the birth-
day greetings there was that folk quality of awesome intimacy
which merely makes its object seem unreal.

The sticky adulation made me squirm. It seemed to me an
imbecile anti-climax of the dream of erect men that the first so-
cialist people should prostrate itself before a leader. When I hinted
at a deep betrayal of the spirit of the revolution I was called
romantic and sentimental. It was of small use to insist that there
was nothing more romantic and sentimental than the theory of
Stalin’s infallibility or the changing of a man into a god.

For several days the flood of eulogy covered the land. Then
Stalin graciously responded in a few lines remarkable, I thought,
for their Biblical flavor. Until the age of eighteen the future Stalin,

STALIN LAUNCHES A SLOGAN

267

then Joseph Dzugashvili, studied in a Greek Orthodox seminary
in Tiflis, and the imprint o£ those years remained on his mind.
It is said that to her dying day his pious mother nursed her dis-
appointment that “Soso” did not become a priest. If she were less
literal she might understand that her ambition has been fully grati-
fied: her son is chief of a militant faith consistently ecclesiastical.
His acknowledgment of the mountain of invocations was printed
in big letters on every front page in the U.S.S.R.:

Your congratulations and greetings I credit to the account of the
great party of the working class which gave me birth and raised me
in its own image. You must not doubt, comrades, that I am ready in
the future, as in the past, to give to the task of the working class, to
the task of proletarian revolution and world communism, all my
strength, all my abilities, and if necessary all my blood, drop by drop.

2

Most of the waiters at the Grand Hotel, like the great chan-
deliers and the gigantic potted palms and the blue-and-gold
crockery and the napkins with grand-ducal coats-of-arms in the
corner, were left-overs from the old regime. The blend of sub-
serviency and camaraderie of their earlier training was overlaid
with a new slovenliness, like a fine antique covered with fresh
dust. Two or three of the older men, in particular, made no secret
of their disdain for their latterday clients. All too rarely there
were diplomats in dinner coats and their ladies in evening gowns
to recall the ancient grandeur. For the rest, the dance nights drew
a miscellany of commonplace foreigners hardly worthy of the
Alexander II dishes. Callous-handed technicians and correspond-
ents and vulgar salesmen ate caviar out of deep bowls and washed
it down with vodka and Caucasian wines and Armenian brandy,
indulging themselves on the thinnish fat of the land by virtue
of inflated rubles. The Russian customers were always fewer,
more apologetic and self-effacing.

The only genuine proletarians in the place were probably the
puffing musicians in the lofty gallery between the two marble-
walled ballrooms. Heroically they strained to imitate the synco-
pated groaning and shouting and caterwauling they heard on
American jazz records 5 they even sang an occasional chorus in

DOUBT

268

what they and other Russians imagined was the English language.
For all their honest sweat, the result was as Russian as Mini.

A permanent expression of astonishment was on their faces as
they looked down between dance numbers into the muted gaiety
of the ballrooms, where people seemed to take miracles like sizzling
shashlik and almost-white bread and steaming gurevietsky kasha
as a matter of course. Perhaps they could see from their perch
more clearly than others the paradox of this tiny islet of satiety
and safety in the oceans of the country’s deprivations. There were
some among the foreigners themselves, I know, who could not
shake off a consciousness of the contrast.

The invisible wall that always separated foreigners from Rus-
sians grew thicker as living conditions in the country deteriorated
and police pressures increased. Their more ample life and greater
freedom isolated foreigners, so that they looked upon the suf-
ferings beyond their narrow inclosure as if from a great distance.
They came to accept the poverty and drabness and chronic uncer-
tainties of the great masses as normal and divinely ordained, even
as white men all through Asia accept the wretchedness of the na-
tives; came to accept it so completely that they no longer noticed
it at all. The advantages of their foreign money in the midst
of inflation, above all the sanctuary of their miraculous foreign
passports, gave the humblest among them a sense of superiority,
as though nature had fashioned them of more delicate materials.

To complain of the deepening miseries of the Soviet population
seemed to most of those complacent foreigners a little quixotic,
as though one were to complain of the low living standards of
cattle. “But they are Russians, my dear man, and they’ve never
known any better ...” A good deal that passed abroad as liberal
tolerance and understanding of the Kremlin’s policies, much that
seemed to readers in New York or London a “friendly attitude”
toward the revolution, amounted to little more than this smug con-
descension. Implicit in the lop-sided approval was the patronizing
satisfaction that the Great Experiment was being tried out in the
Great Social Laboratory so safely far away from home: upon
the teeming Russian coolies instead of the sentient citizens of the
West.

The headlong inflation of the Soviet currency helped to widen
the distance between foreigners and natives. As in the Germany of

STALIN LAUNCHES A SLOGAN 269

the post-war inflation period, though within mucn narrower
bounds, foreigners possessing a little foreign money suddenly were
transformed into persons of wealth. They tasted the lordly feeling
that nothing which money could buy was beyond them. True,
Russia had little to offer at the moment. But that little meant
much because it was denied to others and because it frequently
had the flavor of forbidden fruit. Machinists and reporters who
had never known the thrill of ordering in a restaurant without
even glancing at the right-hand side of the menu, now called for
all the delicacies that were available without a second thought of
cost. Rubles could buy gew-gaws in the commission shops, some-
times a jewel or picture drawn from its twelve-year-old hiding
place by a hard-pressed “former” person; rubles could buy the
company of the luscious girls who hovered around the foreign
colony.

Foreigners knew the lift of safe extravagance. The process of
exchanging foreign money for the inflated rubles involved a faint
sense of guilt, but familiarity erased that in time. Strictly con-
sidered, it was illegal to exchange money anywhere but in the
state banks, where the fictitious official rate of two rubles to the
dollar prevailed. But the foreigner who actually brought his dol-
lars, pounds, or marks to a bank and returned with rubles was
a rare apparition. There were a few, fearful of a blemish on their
ideological record, who attempted to get along without recourse
to inflated rubles, by earning enough Soviet currency locally to
meet their needs. But there was not one resident foreigner — and I
am mindful of the Americans who acted as spokesmen for the
Kremlin — who regularly gave up his good dollars for bad paper
rubles. One who now makes a particular point of emphasizing
his purity in this regard, was the first to induct me in the pro-
cedure.

The whole business was a good deal like drinking during the
prohibition era in America, technically verboten but so universally
practiced that it carried no consciousness of law-breaking. Yet it
was lined with a false and futile embarrassment, evidenced in
silence and evasion by people who wrote on Soviet affairs. Those
who had a professional interest in remaining in the good graces
of the authorities simply did not touch this tender spot in the

DOUBT

270

economic anatomy of their hosts. Among themselves, they dis-
cussed the situation openly, if only to ascertain whether they were
being “gypped” on the rate. In print, they preferred to avoid
the subject.

Several of the correspondents with strong embassy connections
depended on the diplomatic pouch for their supplies of inflated
rubles. Abroad the rate was often twice as high as in Moscow.
One of them used to phone regularly to a friend in Warsaw asking
for a few “bowls of cherries”— cherries being the code-word for
chervontzi , or Soviet banknotes. The rest of us depended on local
contacts. No foreigner was ever molested in this connection, and
in time the intermediaries were mostly G.P.U. men, sensibly
gathering in the valuta directly, instead of extracting it afterwards
from Russians. The authorities recognized that any effort to force
foreign guests to live on the make-believe official standard would
result in a wholesale exodus. Such conformity would have been
a strain on the resources of a millionaire, let alone a hard-working
foreign salesman or reporter.

Once upon a time — the story has acquired a legendary ring —
the cantankerous correspondent of an American newspaper, out
of sheer cussedness, insisted on taking the financial fiction of
“stable” money at face value. With tongue in cheek, he announced
that he would obey the law to the letter. This was before the gov-
ernment had simplified matters for us by accepting foreign cur-
rency for payment at hotels, restaurants, and certain shops. Buying
every ruble at the bank, his costs soared to alarming heights. His
room-rent came to thirty dollars a day, every droshky ride cost
him ten or twenty dollars, every meal fifteen or twenty dollars.
Russian news at that price seemed unreasonable to his newspaper
and he was quickly transferred to another country, as he had ex-
pected. His successor was advised formally by the Press Depart-
ment, on arrival, not to engage in such quixotic leg-pulling, but
1 to do as all his colleagues did.

The loose talk about “speculating in rubles,” directed by com-
munists abroad against writers whose Russian views they did not
approve, is malevolent nonsense. Despite the sinister sound of the
word speculation, the talk merely referred to the fact, known to
every child in Moscow, that all foreigners of necessity obtained

STALIN LAUNCHES A SLOGAN 27 1

currency for their everyday needs — rent and food and services —
on the unofficial inflated exchange basis.

The resident foreigners worked out a conclusive test of idiocy
as applied to exuberant innocents from abroad. Anyone who
emerged from a Soviet visit of more than two days without realiz-
ing that the national money was vastly inflated had passed the
test. A few economists of worldwide reputation passed with flying
colors. It did not pi event them from writing weighty tomes on
Soviet economy.

The more pious foreigners of the Bolshevik persuasion might
hold out for a while against the monetary pressures. But the
Marxian laws of economic determinism did not exempt them and
in the end they were forced to resort to the universal and recog-
nized practice. Witness the plight of a young American near-
communist whom we may call Miss Brown because that is not
her name. She was holding a Soviet job and subsisting on a ruble
income. One afternoon she arrived at the home of the dean of
American correspondents. After fidgeting a bit she blurted it out.
. . . She was in trouble.

“I want your help,” she stammered, “for — for — well, an illegal
operation.”

The correspondent was shocked only because Miss Brown, so
plain and earnest behind her spectacles, was not one whom he
would normally suspect of romantic blundering and its dire con-
sequences.

“Why, of course, Pll do all I can,” he reassured her. “Just don’t
worry. These things are easily arranged here in Moscow.”

“You see,” Miss Brown explained, “it’s not just for myself.
It’s also for my sister Kate.”

“Well, HI be hanged! Two illegal operations!” the corre-
spondent exclaimed. He had not suspected Kate either of an
amorous temperament.

“No, just one operation for the two of us,” Miss Brown cor-
rected him.

The biological puzzle at that point became too complicated for
one mind. But Miss Brown made herself clear. It was a foreign
exchange operation she had in view.

“About fifty dollars’ worth of rubles will see us through,” she
told him.

272

DOUBT

3

A German princess who became autocrat of all the Russians,
Catherine the Great, extended the hospitality of her adopted em-
pire to groups of Germans, chiefly Mennonites, seeking refuge
from religious persecution. About two and a half centuries later,
in the autumn and early winter months of 1929, ten thousand de-
scendants of those exiles tried to escape Russia to some refuge
from what they considered economic persecution. Their frustrated
attempt was one of the most pitiful and dramatic episodes in
the titanic tragedy of the Soviet peasants.

The Germans had settled on the lower Volga in the vicinity of
Saratov, in what is now the Volga German Republic 5 they also
established colonies in Siberia, Crimea, and the Caucasus. Through
all the generations they have retained their racial and religious
identity. They differed from the Russian peasants largely in this:
that they were less meek and more energetic. Had the Kremlin
faced a population of their kind, not all the Red Army and
G.P.U. could have tamed them. The despairing Russian peasant
waylays and murders a few local officials, sets fire to a few
government houses, then waits for the worst to happen. But the
German peasant on the Volga, in Siberia, in Crimea, began to
scheme escape. In Canada, in the United States, in South America,
there are large Mennonite settlements. The dream of migration
spread through all the German farming communities in Russia.
Did “counterrevolutionary elements” propagate the wild idea,
as Moscow officials subsequently charged? Or did the despair of
those peasants conjure the mirage of a new life in the Western
hemisphere?

Suddenly all the trains from the east and the south began
to bring these Germans to the capital. Before the authorities quite
realized what was happening, six or seven thousand had converged
upon Moscow — men, women, and children, lugging their bedding
and other household effects. The G.P.U. hastily cut off the sale
of railroad tickets in the German districts. Police agents went
through trains and forced hundreds to return to their abandoned
homes. Had the exodus not been halted, the streams of Germans

STALIN LAUNCHES A SLOGAN 2J^

pouring into Moscow would have reached twenty or thirty thou-
sands in a few weeks.

Normally, this mass movement would have been crushed by
the government as quickly and ruthlessly as it was crushing other
forms of “recalcitrance” among its hundred and twenty million
peasant subjects. But two circumstances pulled the Kremlin up
short. In the first place, the German Embassy, on instructions from
Berlin, manifested a deep interest. In the second place, the world
press had become aware of the drama and was watching develop-
ments with an attention that inhibited the Soviet authorities.

In the bleak, muddy suburbs of Moscow I found and talked to
these Germans. Having sold their homes, livestock, and other
property that could not be dragged along, they had all started
with a little money. They paid Moscow peasants well for the
privilege of crowding several families into a narrow hut. In one
foul cottage, I saw more than twenty Germans jammed on the
floor among their bundles and wailing children. Others erected
makeshift tents. They were not entitled to rations, and even money
could not buy sufficient food. The diseases of undernourishment,
typhus, and scurvy were spreading among them and infecting
the local population.

At the time the outside world became aware of their plight,
most of them had been camping on the outskirts of the capital
for weeks, a few of them for months. Their delegates besieged
the German Embassy, clamoring for help. The Soviet Foreign
Office, seeking to avoid an international scandal, agreed to issue
passports, exacting the exorbitant fee of 220 rubles, more than
most of them could afford. But it made the issuance contingent
upon visas from Germany. Germany in turn hesitated to promise
visas until the Canadian government had agreed to admit them;
it did not relish the responsibility of thousands of pauperized
Russian-Germans at a time of growing unemployment. While the
complicated negotiations were under way, the funds of the refugees
dwindled, their courage waned, and disease made deeper inroads
upon them.

I saw among them pathetic scenes and anguished faces that will
never fade from my memory. A group of us went from house
to house, talking to wretched men and women, sick, hungry, be-

DOUBT

274

wildered. Everywhere it was the same story. They could not
leave the country — and they had nothing to go back to.

“The G.P.U. is packing us into cattle cars and sending us back
home. Home!” The woman smiled bitterly through her tears,
“but we have no home. We sold everything for kopeks practically
gave it away.”

While negotiations for their emigration dragged, the G.P.U.
came each day to drive hundreds more into stinking box cars
for the long journey back to the demolished homes. The new
contingents who were evading the embargo on travel and arriv-
ing in Moscow were not allowed to alight. About one thousand,
it was said, did obtain passports and visas and went on to Canada.
The rest were hustled unceremoniously to the places of their
origin. Rumor had it that many of the cattle cars packed with
Germans were diverted to the far Northern forests and dumped
where the government needed labor. How many of the ten thou-
sand survived and how they rebuilt their shattered lives, we could
not ascertain. In the greater calamity of the next months ten thou-
sand more or less became utterly negligible in the total of mil-
lions.

This German episode shook many foreign observers out of
their complacency. It gave them a glimpse of the terror that had
already gripped the nation’s peasantry. We had become inured
to newspaper and private accounts of murder, arson, mass ar-
rests, and indiscriminate executions that year. Sheer repetition took
the edge off the whole business, just as in time of war casualty lists
tend to lose their human content and turn into monotonous rows
of dull figures.

As pressure in. the villages increased, tens of thousands flocked
to the cities. The garbled stories of the German exodus spread
by word of mouth put the idea of escape into Russian heads as
well. Moscow railroad stations began to look like encampments.
Additional border guards and bloodhounds were placed along the
western frontier to stop the wild scramble of frightened peasants
from Russia into Rumania, Poland, and the Baltic countries. Fin-
land protested against the influx of peasant refugees from Soviet
Karelia. Stringent orders were issued to local Soviets and railroad
functionaries to prevent the flight of peasants. Those without

STALIN LAUNCHES A SLOGAN 275

formal permits to travel were put off the trains. Despite these
measures, thousands more arrived in Moscow and other large cities
every day, to lie around helplessly, waiting for a miracle.

My dispatches during these months spoke of the remarkable
“success” of the collectivization policies. In the Ukraine, for in-
stance, 1,400,000 hectares were already “socialized” although it
had been planned to socialize no more than 1,300,000 hectares in
five years! In the country as a whole about 10% of the peasantry
was already in collectives as against the 4% scheduled for that
year.

It was an open secret that these “successes” were based on naked
force. Repeatedly, the same weapon had been used against the
peasants. Each time the government had been obliged to retreat,
but the Kremlin’s patience proved greater than the peasants’ re-
sistance. This time there would be no retreat.

The official villain in the concentrated attack was the kulak,
though precisely who he was no one knew for sure. Before the
revolution, the kulak had been a fairly well-defined category in
the social structure of the countryside. He was the peasant whose
energy, shrewdness, and lack of scruples combined to lodge eco-
nomic power in his hands. He was a money lender, perhaps owned
a mill where he exacted ungodly toll from his neighbors, leased
other people’s land on one-sided terms. Through hard work,
usury, and exploitation he often gathered the lives of the less
capable peasants in his fist — the word kulak means “fist.” Tsarist
statesmen, such as Stolypin, recognized the kulak’s role as the
rural capitalist and encouraged him to wax fat. He was ardently
despised, and no less ardently envied, by the mass of poor peasants.

Foreigners writing about the agrarian phase of the Soviet revo-
lution too often have accepted the term kulak in this pre-revolu-
tionary sense, sometimes in ignorance, more often with deliberate
cynicism. That made it easier to represent what happened from
1929 forward as an indignant revolt of the masses against a small
and hateful group of parasites. Soviet propaganda standardized
the kulak as a fat-bellied, blood-sucking monster, a sort of human
spider luring innocent peasants into his web. This over-simplifica-
tion soothes the consciences of those writers or their readers. It
has little bearing on the truth.

After the revolution, the opprobrious label of kulak was stretched

DOUBT

276

to cover any peasant who employed labor or who owned a little
more property than the rest. By 1929, it was converted into a
generic term of abuse, with only a tenuous reference to economic
possessions. Whoever failed conspicuously to fall into line with
the Soviet policies was thereby marked as a kulak. If his poverty
was such as to make the title preposterous he was called a “kulak
agent” and treated as one anyhow. In the old days, there might
have been one or two or a dozen kulaks in a village. Under the
new dispensation, their number rose into the hundreds. Any
peasant who was too outspoken in the general dislike of collec-
tivization, taxes, grain deliveries, became a kulak. In the tragic
months of forcible collectivization, there were scores of villages
without a single kulak, in the economic sense, which “liquidated”
4 or 5% of their inhabitants as kulaks and kulak agents all the
same.

On December 27, the press published the text of an address
made by Stalin two days earlier to a group of agrarian officials,
in which he raised the slogan of “liquidation of the kulaks as a
class.” It was the signal for the most startling piece of brutality,
considering its dimensions, in the annals of revolution. Stalin
neither defined a kulak nor cautioned against excesses. Meek Rus-
sian historians and their complacent foreign parrots have carefully
revised the record of this time to shift the responsibility for the
horrors from Stalin to his supposedly “over-zealous” local agents.

No one who was there on December 27 and the months that
followed had the slightest doubt who issued the order or what
the order was. What Stalin said and the deliberate vagueness and
ambiguity of his use of the word kulak were an unequivocal invita-
tion — more, an imperious command — to smash and disperse be-
tween five and ten million peasant men, women, and children as
quickly and rapaciously as possible.

4

The celebration of the bourgeois New Year was forbidden. Dire
penalties, the press hinted, awaited those who absented themselves
from work because 1929 turned into 1930. Since the date had
neither religious nor economic connotations, the Marxian logic of
the taboo was somewhat blurred. In subsequent years, the date

STALIN LAUNCHES A SLOGAN 277

was restored to respectability. But the mood of the Kremlin at
this juncture had no need for logic. The non-stop year must not
be interrupted by astronomy or calendars. Anyone who was caught
wishing anyone else a Happy New Year, rumor had it, would be
punished by the G.P.U. The rumor was unfounded of course, but
it reflects the temper of the moment.

New Year’s Eve was celebrated all the same. There were stag-
gering drunks in all the streets of Moscow to attest the fact,
and whispered invitations to New Year’s parties behind locked
doors. Indeed, the tang of danger seemed to sharpen the edge of
the festivities. Billy and I visited several of the gatherings in Rus-
sian homes, and we ended the night at the Grand Hotel.

We found as loud and gay a gathering as Berlin or Paris could
boast that night. Every inch of space was crowded. Champagne
bottles lounged nonchalantly in their silver buckets. Pretty girls
hawked balloons and dolls at shameless prices, the air was a wilder-
ness of paper streamers, and we walked ankle-deep in confetti.
The raucous near- jazz from the lofty gallery struggled to make
itself heard above the laughter and the shouting. The mildewed
waiters were for once in their ancient element: this was the ex-
travagance, the rowdy gaiety, the holiday spirit that they remem-
bered from the past. They picked their way through the crowd
in a glow of excitement, carrying heavy-laden trays. It was a New
Year’s Party in high gear, hitting on all cylinders, with slightly
inebriated drivers at the wheel.

Most of the guests were foreigners, but the Russian representa-
tion was larger than usual. All those who had the means and dared
to be happy in public— writers, actors, a few G.P.U. agents, etc —
were at the hotel. Balloons popped. In one corner a woman
laughed hysterically. An American engineer staggered and flailed
his long arms among the dancers, but no one minded him. Some-
where a discordant chorus sang, “For he’s a jolly good fellow.
Somewhere a drunken voice brawled, “Now you lay off my girl
or I’ll knock your goddam head off.” Glasses clinked and an
exuberant member of the Maly Theatre smashed a glass on the
floor. Vashe sdoroviye! Skol! Prosit! A votre same! Salute !
Mud in your eye, you old somof-a-gun! The orchestra again, for
the tenth time that night, played Hallelujah ! Hour after hour,
the party gained momentum.

DOUBT

278

Beyond the marble walls of the Grand Hotel, women were
already on line waiting for the stores to open hours later. Mur-
der and arson, arrests and exiles by the tens of thousand, were
under way in the villages. The masses of lishentzi , disfranchised
people, counted their crumbs of bread and waited to be expelled
from their apartments. The dread slogan of liquidation of the
kulaks as a class” had just been uttered by Stalin.

No, this party was unlike anything in Montmartre or on the
Kurfuerstendamm, despite the balloons and dolls and confetti. It
was touched with hysteria. Even the foreigners, though safe them-
selves, could not be wholly unaware of the ground that trembled
under them as they danced, that would explode soon in a fearful
orgy of violence and brutality. There was a macabre zest to this
New Year’s Eve celebration. It was a party on a battlefield, in a
besieged city, on the edge of a volcano belching death.

II. The Peasants Are Conquered

SIXTY-FIVE days elapsed between Stalin’s launching, on De-
cember 27, of the slogan “liquidation of the kulaks as a class,”
and his order, on March 2, calling a halt to the lawlessness that
ensued. For sheer volume of piled-up cruelties there are few com-
parable spans of time in all human history. The ruthless crushing
of more than a million better-to-do or less tractable families —
five or six million people — had begun before the fateful slogan
was announced. It continued spasmodically after the Kremlin had
called off the orgy of violence. But the process reached its fevered
heights in these tumultuous days.

The casual, half-illicit brutalities tacitly encouraged by Moscow
all through 1929 were now sanctified by Stalin’s explicit prescrip-
tion.

The restraint of the original figures calling for 20% socialization
of agriculture in five years was forgotten. It was now ordained
that the most important grain-growing regions, such as the Lower
and Middle Volga basins and North Caucasus, must be completely
collectivized that very year, that the rest of the country’s grain
area must be completely collectivized in the following year, and
that “kulak farms” must be wholly eliminated.

The strategy of the campaign was plain enough. Obliteration of
the allegedly kulak elements was not only an end in itself, but
a means for stampeding the rest of the population into submission
to collectivization. Whatever hocus-pocus of village meetings of
the poor might be invoked to select the quota of victims, the
palpable objective was to scare the poor and middling peasants
themselves into merging their land, livestock, and implements.
Indeed, the only sure way to prove that they were not kulaks
was to apply and be accepted as collective members. The fearful
kulak doom was a weapon for terrorizing the rest of the peasantry.
The true measure of the terror, therefore, is not alone in the
millions who were despoiled and deported from their native soil,

279

DOUBT

280

but the sixty million peasants who rushed madly for the shelter
of hastily organized kolkhozes , collective farms. In a few months
about 50% of the peasants suddenly discovered the virtues of so-
cialization 5 all of them would have made the discovery if the
process had not been abruptly curbed.

Hell broke loose in seventy thousand Russian villages. The
pent-up jealousies of a generation, the sadistic instincts of self-
important little officials, the inflamed zeal of local communists,
were unleashed and whipped into fury. The haphazard persecu-
tions of the preceding months were systematized and legalized and
invested with a high crusading fervor. Seventy thousand localized
Red Terrors, with the G.P.U. troops and the Red Army to make
them effective. Though no one knew precisely what a kulak was,
there was no dearth of them anywhere. Sometimes mass meetings
of the village poor, under the steamrollers of local or visiting
officials, confirmed the choice of victims j frequently this empty
mummery was dispensed with. As many as 15 or 20% of the
peasants were “liquidated” in some villages.

A population as large as all of Switzerland’s or Denmark’s was
stripped clean of all their belongings— not alone their land and
homes and cattle and tools, but often their last clothes and food
and household utensils— and driven out of their villages. They
were herded with bayonets at railroad stations, packed indis-
criminately into cattle cars and freight cars, and dumped weeks
later in the lumber regions of the frozen North, the deserts of
Central Asia, wherever labor was needed, there to live or die.
Some of this human wreckage was merely flung beyond the limits
of their former villages, without shelter or food in those winter
months, to start life anew if they could, on land too barren to
have been cultivated in the past.

No dependable computation of the number liquidated has ever
been made, and in any case there is no arithmetic to estimate
human suffering. The total was beyond reckoning. Forcible migra-
tion of millions could not be organized or provisioned, but must
proceed in fearful confusion.

Tens of thousands died of exposure, starvation, and epidemic
diseases while being transported, and no one dared guess at the
death rate in the wilderness where the liquidated population was
dispersed.

THE PEASANTS ARE CONQUERED 28 I

Locomotives dragged their loads of agony from every part of
the nation under armed guards and when the human debris had
been emptied in some forest or desert, jogged back for more.

Thousands of bewildered refugees, panic fear in their eyes,
flocked to the cities, where they were once more corralled, stuffed
into disease-ridden cars, and hauled away to' the dumps.

The plague of bezfrizorny , homeless waifs, from the civil war
and famine years had almost been cured 5 now new thousands of
boys and girls, mere infants some of them seemed, roamed through
the land. They were the children of kulak parents who had died
or who preferred to leave their children to shift for themselves
rather than to drag them into exile.

I saw batches of the victims at provincial railroad points, under
G.P.U. guards, like bewildered animals, staring vacantly into space.
These meek, bedraggled, work-worn creatures were scarcely the
kulaks of the propaganda posters. The spectacle of peasants being
led by soldiers with drawn revolvers through the streets even of
Moscow was too commonplace to win more than a casual glance
from the crowds on the sidewalks. I talked to refugees who came
to our doors to beg a few crumbs of bread, to officials who had
taken part in the liquidation in Ukrainian villages, to Soviet re-
porters assigned to describe the great Stalinist “successes.” No
man can see with his own eyes a social upheaval of such scope.
But from isolated tales of terror, from the scenes I happened to
witness, from the hints and tell-tale drcumlocutions in the press,
I came to know and to feel some part at least of the unfolding
nightmare.

At the moment it was distinctly “unfriendly” on a correspond-
ent’s part to describe these events in detail. Those who wished
to remain in the good graces of the Kremlin regime had to limit
themselves to the spurious formulas used by the press and the
statistical boasts about collectivization victories: to reduce a major
human catastrophe to meaningless impersonal percentages. For a,
few correspondents it provided a useful opportunity to demonstrate
their “friendship” and “loyalty” for the Soviet regime by explain-
ing away ugly facts, wrapping them in the cellophane of Marxist
verbiage, slurring over them with cynical allusions to broken eggs
for Soviet omelettes. Others were curbed by the censorship, and
grateful enough on occasion for this convenient alibi for silence.

DOUBT

282

The occasional dispatch that betrayed the horror felt by even
the most cynical among us seemed “sensational” to readers abroad,
against the consistent evasions of the general run of press re-
ports. And thus it happened that the world at large was scarcely
aware of what was occurring in Russia. The world was aroused,
instead, on issues that were secondary. The capitalist press be-
came alar med at the statistical triumphs of Soviet industrializa-
tion and raised the ludicrous cry of “dumping.” Accepting at face
value the boasts of Soviet propaganda, exaggerating Russian in-
dustrial expansion in the pessimistic mood induced by the world-
wide depressions, bourgeois opinion actually imagined that the
world would be drowned tomorrow morning in a deluge of cheap
Soviet-made goods. The noisy and far-fetched “anti-dumping”
campaign attested how thoroughly Soviet propaganda had con-
cealed the mounting hardships of its industrialization efforts, the
deplorable quality of its output, the staggering economic cost of
its production, the collapse of its currency. Whatever they may
have said publicly, Bolshevik leaders were not half as optimistic
about their Five Year Plan as the editorial writers in capitalist
lands.

At the same time, the Pope initiated, early in February, a holy
crusade against the Soviet Union for its persecution of religion.
He designated March 19 as a day of prayer for the cessation of
Soviet anti-religious terror. Other religious elements, Protestants,
Jews, Mohammedans, joined the crusade. Moscow’s offensive
against religion was no more than a subsidiary maneuver in the
larger strategy against Nepmen, private farmers, pre-revolutionary
intellect uals — of relatively minor interest both to the Russian gov-
ernment and the Russian people.

But that was the only aspect of the Russian situation which
touched the conscience of mankind. The more basic human tragedy
under the matter-of-fact phrase “liquidation of the kulaks” was
ignored.

2

Stalin’s claim to statesmanship of a high order must rest in
large degree upon his formula of “liquidation of the kulaks as
a class.” He provided a convenient name for the technique of
terror that had been gathering momentum for months. His for-

THE PEASANTS ARE CONQUERED 283

mula gave the whole process new dimensions of revolutionary self-
righteousness, and almost “scientific” justification. Haphazard per-
secutions were turned overnight into a high-minded campaign.

There was a certain genius in the choice of the magic phrase.
The words “liquidation of the kulaks” carry few implications of
human agony. It seems a formula of social engineering and has
an impersonal and metallic ring. But for those who saw the
process at close range the phrase is freighted with horror. In my
own mind it evokes that sharpening sense of multitudinous miseries,
of catastrophe overwhelming a huge population like some sudden
flood or earthquake, which came to me vividly at that time. Run-
ning through that sense, giving it the special macabre quality in
memory, was the awareness that the destruction and suffering,
which seemed a natural calamity, were in fact man-made, artificially
whipped up — that they could be stopped by a word of command
from one man, as indeed they were stopped, too late.

It was as if, in the midst of a terrible volcanic eruption, one
were to catch sight of someone turning a crank that kept the hot
lava pouring over men and towns. The fine motives of those
who turned the crank made the image no less gruesome.

There are smug economists and sociologists who inform us that
all great social changes take a heavy toll in human life. They
take many pages to prove that certain changes in land tenure and
industrial processes in England, between 1700 and 1850, caused
widespread suffering commensurate in volume with that caused
by the “liquidation of the kulaks.” That sophistry fails to distin-
guish between a natural evolutionary economic process developing
inevitably through decades and centuries, and an arbitrary decision
by a handful of men, compressed into a few months of terror.

Let those “scientific” historians recall that what Anna Louise
Strong calls “the most spectacular act of ruthlessness which oc-
curred in those years” was a decision calmly made by a political
machine, in defiance of the majority opinion in its own ranks and
in defiance of the people in whose name — for whose “own good”
— it was made. There were few in Moscow who doubted that
rank-and-file opinion in the Communist Party was opposed to such
drastic and costly methods. The self-appointed apologists among
foreigners not only admitted this, but pointed to it proudly as
another proof of Stalin’s daring leadership. Theirs was the per-

DOUBT

284

verted logic which holds that if it takes courage to inflict pain on
one, that courage is magnified a millionfold if it inflicts pain on
a million. tc Strong must have been the faith” the saintly Fabians,
Beatrice and Sidney Webb, were to write of this episode years
later in their comfortable library, “and. resolute the will of the
men who , in the interest of what seemed to them the fublic
goody could take so momentous a decision.” No doubt just such
self-satisfied Fabians must have commended the strong faith and
resolute will that enabled other men in other times to order
holy inquisitions and St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres.

Men have ever rationalized their deeds in terms of some in-
spired goal, and self-righteous bigots have done more blood-let-
ting than criminals and fiends. The capacity to kill and torture,
whether wholesale or retail, is equally pathological whatever its
motives, and surely more dangerous when those motives are osten-
sibly idealistic. The more fundamental problem is whether any
group of mortal men, however sincere their faith or their phobia,
may arrogate to themselves the prerogatives of dispensing death
and misery to millions of their fellowmen; whether humankind
dare entrust its destiny to men who regard themselves as History
incarnate, mad Jehovahs loosing the floods of their fury to cleanse
a wicked world.

The cleavage in the upper reaches of the ruling minority be-
came sharpest at this time. The policy of liquidating the kulaks and
coercing the peasants into improvised collectives, the most dras-
tic enterprise in the whole course of the revolution, was acting as
a touchstone of men’s essential character. Outwardly, there were
differences in theory and political principle and much bandying
of sacred texts from Marx and Lenin. But these were no more
than crude rationalizations of deeper differences, of the heart
rather than the mind. Night after night I discussed the conflict
with communists; what was true of them was true of those near
the apex of power.

The real division was between those who could go through
with a terrifying piece of brutality and those who could not;
those who, whether they formulated it in such wise or not, re-
garded human life as in itself valid beyond sanctified words or
pseudo-scientific theories, and the others to whom human life
was so much worthless raw stuff for their laboratories; between the

THE PEASANTS ARE CONQUERED 285

despised and soft-hearted “idealists” and the hard-boiled “realists*”

It is no accident that those contaminated with Western influ-
ences found themselves inevitably in opposition. The new leader-
ship, profoundly disdainful of life and indifferent to individual
suffering, ready to mortify the nation’s flesh for the sake of its
immortal soul, stemmed from Russia’s entire past* The decision
was not made just by Stalin and his lieutenants, but by Peter
the Great and Ivan the Terrible. It was preordained by a thou-
sand years of consistent history, whose symbols are the torture
chambers under the Kremlin and the ancient execution block still
standing outside its walls.

What occurred in these sixty-five days has been described as
a “second agrarian revolution,” in many ways greater than the first.
I have myself played variations on this theme. And the description
is true enough if any violent change affecting a large sector of
mankind is a “revolution.” Rut revolution in its idealistic sense, in
the sense that social rebels and prophets even unto Lenin have
accepted it, implies a spontaneous and instinctive human explosion.
It implies masses goaded beyond endurance revolting at last against
injustice and oppression.

And in that sense what we witnessed was certainly not a revo-
lution. It was not an eruption from below, but an organized im-
position from above. Forcible collectivization was no more a “revo-
lution” than the seizure of India by Englishmen or Abyssinia by
I talian s, than the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 or
the subjugation of red men by whites in the Americas. In the
first agrarian revolution, in 1917, a pent-up fury and hunger
broke through the dams of an established order— peasant masses
“liquidated” the landlords and seized their lands and a govern-
ment rode to power on the crest of their revolt. But in i 93 p a
powerful dictatorship used its armies and its legalized local officials
and social machinery to “liquidate” a portion of the peasantry
and to intimidate the rest.

No, it was no revolution but a conquest of the peasantry. To
argue that it may have been necessary or that it will ultimately
benefit the people whom it affected, or that it had support in some
sections of the invaded area, makes it no less a conquest; those
are precisely the justifications advanced for every conquest from
time immemorial.

DOUBT

286

The ground was prepared in the skirmishing of 1929. The con-
quest was carried through in the first months of 1930. What fol-
lowed in the next few years, when the liquidation of kulaks was
completed and collectivization firmly established at an enormous
cost in human life, was the “pacification” of the vanquished, which
always follows the conquest of a people stubbornly opposed to com -
pulsory blessings.

3

The fevered atmosphere of forcible agrarian collectivization
was spread far beyond the villages. It raised the revolutionary
temperature everywhere to delirious levels. “Dizziness from suc-
cess” was the phrase later minted by Stalin for the overstrained
condition. City Soviets would not remain behindhand as against
their country colleagues and sought to match liquidation of the
kulaks with a no less hasty liquidation of the miserable remnants
of private trade. There were days in which tens of thousands of
“speculators” were arrested, imprisoned or driven from the cities:
harried creatures, denied respectable employment by law, who
sold toothpicks, home-made garments, second-hand boots, stale
hunks of bread, matches, a little sunflower seed oil, in the private
markets. Further revisions of living space were ordered in Mos-
cow and elsewhere, so that former Nepmen and other class enemies,
whether eight years old or eighty, might be expelled from their
cramped quarters.

The underlying assumption of the period was that anything
might be achieved by stalwart Leninists with knout in hand.

The wholesale closure of prayer houses and harassment of
believers gained impetus. Christmas celebrations early in Janu-
ary (because of the Greek Orthodox calendar) were marked by
noisy anti-religious parades and insulting demonstrations outside
church doors. Batches of priests and rabbis were rounded up and
imprisoned, their fate hardly noticed in the Russian turmoil but
evoking shrieks of protest from co-religionists abroad. Solemnly
the Godless Society aped the State Planning Commission by an-
nouncing a “five-year plan for the liquidation of religion.” For
the first time since the early outbursts just after the revolution,
public bonfires were made of icons.

In the domain of industry and construction, things seemed to

THE PEASANTS ARE CONQUERED 287

stall momentarily, adding to the general chaos of exhortations
and threats. The capitalist depression forced down world market
prices, so that Russia was obliged to ship out even more of its
food to pay for the same machines. Rations inevitably grew shorter
and the value of the ruble dwindled. Not only must a people ac-
customed through all its history to dawdle be sweated, but sweated
under conditions of chronic undernourishment.

Small wonder that more than half the output of important
factories was spoiled beyond use. Bitter wags whispered that the
plan for brak , meaning defective goods, had been “overfulfilled,”
and grudging official statements gave point to the witticism. A
mere 15 or 20% of spoilage was considered “normal” by factory
managers. Small wonder, too, that workers would not stay put at
their jobs, but moved restlessly from city to city, from con-
struction site to construction site, searching for the non-existent
place where food supplies and living conditions were more toler-
able. In certain plants, the press complained, the turnover of
labor was 100% a month! The wanderings of a dissatisfied pro-
letariat assumed the proportions of a confused zigzagging mass
migration, parallel with the forced migration from the villages.

For foreigners, life went on without much change. The Grand
Hotel orchestra still perspired over Hallelujah . In palaces built
by merchant princes foreign diplomats gave lavish receptions,
where opera stars warbled and ladies in decollete thrilled over
new ballerinas and American correspondents gloriously forgot
their manners. Cynicism being the convention of our trade, we
mixed current atrocity stories with champagne and retailed
“Radek’s latest joke,” which probably was not Radek’s at all.
One such anecdote had it that the denizens of the Kremlin, from
Stalin down, were suddenly infested with body lice like unto
an Egyptian plague. Science could do nothing to eradicate it and
finally Stalin sent for Radek. “The solution is simple,” Radek
supposedly said, “just collectivize the lice, then half of them will
die and the other half will run away.” Few of the facts of despera-
tion and disaster which filled our conversation showed up in our
dispatches. The taboos of a powerful government in an angry
know-nothing mood are not broken lightly by resident newspaper-
men who have jobs to protect and families to feed.

By the middle of February, the government could claim that

DOUBT

288

50% of the peasant households were collectivized. In important
grain regions the percentage was close to one hundred. By the
end of February the general percentage of socialization had risen
to sixty. The conquest was thorough.

But the body social, like the human body, can stand so much
pain and no more. Every good surgeon know this, and now the
social surgeons in the Kremlin were to learn it, though they for-
got the lesson too soon. The country reacted to the pressure in
an unexpected and calamitous manner. Before capitulating to com-
pulsory collectivization, the peasants took the precaution of slaugh-
tering their livestock. Even before the order to liquidate the kulaks
as a class was decreed, the peasants had begun to' kill their cattle
and sheep and pigs for meat and hides, rather than merge them
in socialized herds. Now this practice became epidemic. In some
places more than half the livestock was destroyed, and in the
country as a whole the depletion was alarming, the losses being
in direct proportion to the coercion used to achieve socialization.

The Kremlin prescribed heavy imprisonments and other punish-
ments for the slaughter of cattle. Then it decreed the death 'pen-
alty for killing livestock — an extraordinary measure even for an
extraordinary time. But the animals continued to be destroyed by
the hundred thousand all the same. It was this frightful slaughter
— a sort of convulsive reaction to pain — which, more than any
other single factor, recalled the Kremlin to its senses. The govern-
ment might not be alarmed by the human slaughter, by the death
of tens of thousands of kulak infants, it might ignore the meek
plea of Lenin’s widow for mercy, but it could not ignore the de-
struction of the nation’s horses and cattle. That represented work-
ing power and food and raw materials, whether socialized or pri-
vately owned. It meant the impoverishment of the agrarian re-
sources they wished to socialize.

The economic losses entailed by the sixty-five days of ferocious
compulsion were almost incalculable. The most efficient farmers
were put to cutting timber, digging canals, or just killed off. More
animal power had been destroyed by far than could be replaced
for many years by mechanical power. At one blow, the Stalin
regime, for all its undaunted “realism” and hard-boiled practical-
ity, had handicapped the revolution by a catastrophic sacrifice of
meat, dairy products, wool, leather, and other animal products.

THE PEASANTS ARE CONQUERED 289

A large measure of the food and goods shortages of the follow-
ing years may be attributed directly to the extermination of ani-
mals by desperate peasants as their automatic reaction to forcible
collectivization. In 1929, Russia had replenished the losses of the
civil war period and the famine 5 it had more domestic animals
than in 1916. But by the end of the Five Year Plan it had lost
half of its cattle and horses, two-thirds of its sheep and goats, two-
fifths of its pigs. The greater part of these staggering losses oc-
curred in the months of which we are now speaking, the rest when
similar methods of coercion were revived later. Bolshevik leaders
admitted that it would take a decade under the most propitious
conditions to restore livestock to the 1929 level.

The ludicrous “idealists,” those who hesitated to inflict too
much pain on the population, may have been nearer right, even
in practical economic terms, than the thick-skinned heritors of
Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.

4

On March 2, Stalin peremptorily called off the terror. In an
article entitled “Dizziness from Success,” he blamed the mis-
guided zeal of local officials for the “excesses.” He jeered at
“r-r-revolutionaries” who “think they can start a collective by
pulling down church bells” or socialize unsuitable regions by
“military force.” Had those imbeciles forgotten that collectiviza-
tion must be “voluntary”? How dared they force collectivization
on Central Asiatic nomads or far Northern primitive tribes! Why
must the idiots push collectivization immediately to the extreme
of socializing pigs and chickens!

In short, the ruling group in the Kremlin, though it had not
uttered a word of caution while the delirium gained sway, now
sanctimoniously disavowed responsibility and championed the per-
secuted peasantry. In a sense, it turned the bewildered local offi-
cials over to the wrath and sometimes to the furious vengeance of
their village neighbors. The country was asked to believe that
Stalin and his associates had remained ignorant of the atrocities
and the “military force” which were familiar to every child in
Moscow — even to foreign reporters. Having discovered the sad
facts belatedly — after millions of obdurate peasants had been torn

DOUBT

290

by the roots from their native soil, and the country had lost a
substantial part of its animal wealth — Stalin now acted bravely
to stop the outrages.

The lie was transparent. But the sense of relief was so over-
powering that nobody could think of blaming Stalin. On the
contrary, he was praised jubilantly for his merciful sagacity. There
was something that partook of the supernatural in the power of
the man’s word. One day, a great nation was steeped in gloom,
huddling in stupefied fear under black clouds amidst darting light-
ning. Next day, the skies were clear and the nation breathed more
freely. And all because one man had caused a short article to be
published.

“Its statesmanship,” the New York Times correspondent cabled
enthusiastically, “appears to put Stalin on a level with Lenin him-
self.” The peasants, like the correspondent, were too joyful for
logic. They forgot that Stalin had given the signal for the terror
which he now magnanimously halted, that he had kept it going
in the face of “excesses” too much on the surface to be missed.
The very fact that a word of his sufficed to stop the horror made
him clearly responsible for the failure to speak it in time; this,
too, they ignored. Instead, they kneeled before their icons to praise
his kind heart and measureless mercy. Distorted echoes of the
Pope’s campaign had reached the villages and many peasants
praised the Pope as well as Stalin for saving them from the
rapacity of their local communists and “activists.” The notion that
Stalin and the Pope jointly had intervened in this hour of ad-
versity spread far and wide.

Nearly two-thirds of the paper collectives collapsed. The 63 %
of collectivized farms fell quickly to 22%. Many of the peasants
remained in the collectives simply because, having killed off their
draft animals, they had nothing with which to resume individual
farming.

The Soviet newspapers suddenly recognized “great mistakes.”
If, until March 2, it had been the mark of a counter-revolutionary
to believe the terror stories from the villages, now it became
creditable “self-criticism” to tell those stories in gruesome detail.
Pagefuls of atrocity tales were published by way of exemplifying
the “r-r-revolutionary” stupidities now graciously outlawed by the
Communist Party. Those correspondents who had taken it upon

THE PEASANTS ARE CONQUERED 29 1

themselves to “deny” the “absurd” reports about mass terror were
left in a somewhat uncomfortable posture.

The pressure was turned off by Stalin just as a few months
earlier it had been turned on: a faucet opened and closed at will.
None of this, however, could restore the dead and patch together
the millions of shattered homes. The forests were populated with
degraded liquidated kulaks, their wives, and their children. Hordes
of the unfortunates were put to work on bread-and-water rations
to cut logs and dig canals and build roads. An employer with a
big job to do — a collective employer, the state — now had a vast
supply of cheap, half-starved, frightened and helpless workers to
draw upon.

It was on the basis of the new, ever-growing mass of so-called
kulaks in exile that the system of forced labor was to grow apace.
Before long, Dnieperstroi, Magnitostroi, every important con-
struction job, had its crowded barracks for the deported kulaks,
virtual prisoners of the state, as well as for the actual convicted
prisoners who were locked in at the end of the working day. Con-
veniently enough, the supply of kulaks and convicts increased as
the need for cheap labor increased.

The concentrated terror of the sixty-five days marked a frontier
in my thinking and feeling. For two years I had been building an
intricate structure of justifications for the Soviet regime. Now,
without my willing it, the structure began to disintegrate around
me. The color and the strength seemed to have run out of the
symbols of the faith for me; the socialist slogans and songs, the
brave revolutionary promises, the parades and invocations for a
better world, now seemed to me touched with mockery.

It was at this time, too, that I faced more consciously the prob-
lem with which I was to wrestle for many years: to tell or not to
tell. As vividly as though it were yesterday I recalled my private
pledge never to attack the Soviet regime, but I was no longer so
certain that a recital of Soviet actualities constituted attack on the
proletarian revolution. What if the revolution at this stage needed
the defense of exposure to world opinion? What if the concen-
tration of autocratic power in the fists of a few leaders needed the
corrective of public responsibility for their deeds?

It was not a problem unique to myself. Communists and Soviet

DOUBT

292

sympathizers the world over were trying to solve it to save their
intellectual integrity. Some o£ them had decided that the Stalin
regime was not necessarily synonymous with communism and revo-
lution, any more than the Christian Church is always synonymous
with the ideals of Christianity. A few went further and insisted
that the world revolution must not be burdened with the mistakes
and failures of the Soviet Union, but must dig the grain of social-
ism out of the Soviet soil and renounce the dirt and dross. The
rest held steadfastly to the theory that it was all a family affair,
to be hidden from strangers and hidden especially from the work-
ing classes: that victories must be exaggerated, failures denied,
and the vision of a socialist fatherland nurtured at all costs.

Though I was increasingly outspoken in my reports of the
Soviet scene, I still held in the main to the last alternative.

III. We Move to a Mansion

WHILE graver issues were being decided on a hundred fronts
of the Piatiletka (Five Year Plan), I became embroiled in a minor
war of my own making. The straw that broke the back of my
patience was so light that I no longer recall what it was. But I
fired the secretary-interpreter whom I had inherited from a chain
of U.P. predecessors.

Since I had not hired her, the chances are that I exceeded my
authority in firing her. In any case, in a few days an order came
through from President Bickel to “put Jmudskaya back on the
payroll.” I obeyed. I informed her that she was again on the pay-
roll but warned her not to show up to work because she was still
fired. The argument by cable grew acrid and I was reconciled to
dismissal in defense of my divine right to choose my own secre-
tary.

And at this point the Soviet government, whose benevolence,
like God’s mercy, embraces small things as well as large, took a
hand in the matter. Apparently it had no wish to lose my services ;
for all my recent skittishness I was still very much in the harness
of a “friendly” correspondent. As usual, Trivas was the liaison
officer.

“That’s quite a row you’re having over Jmudskaya,” he smiled.

“Yes, how do you know?”

“Oh, we have ways of knowing,” he winked. “And that female
is saying God-awful things about you in letters to Bickel and
Keen. The girl has imagination.”

“How would you know what she writes to them?”

For answer Trivas drew out a notebook and read me excerpts
from Miss Jmudskaya’s rather hysterical complaints to the head
offices.

“You mean that you are reading her letters?”

“Not me, of course. But they’re being read, and headquarters

293

DOUBT

294

thought you ought to know what she is saying. You see, we should
be very much distressed if the United Press recalled you.”

I confess that I relished the amusing situation: knowing the con-
tents of the embattled enemy’s postal onslaughts long before the
letters reached their destination. My protests against the official
snooping at the post office were possibly less vigorous than they
might have been. It was the revolution’s way of helping my cause.

Then Ed Keen, head of the U.P. in Europe, was rushed to
Moscow to adjust the quarrel. He found me stubbornly deaf to
pleas for compromise and all but packed to go home. Acting as
guide to Keen was Miss Jmudskaya’s last service to the United
Press.

Keen had come equipped as for a siege in the Arctic, but per-
versely the winter turned mild and mushy. The political situation
on the contrary was lustily inclement, and his veteran reportorial
instincts told him that even the Lyons- Jmudskaya conflict was
minor compared with the class conflict in the villages. If he failed
to placate his correspondent, he succeeded in interviewing Premier
Rykov. All the resident correspondents had been clamoring for
such an interview. As usual the plum fell into the lap of a visiting
journalist, much to the chagrin of the permanent press corps.

Rykov pooh-poohed the idea that his regime was persecuting
religion. The “successes on the anti-religious front,” the bearded
Premier informed Keen, must be credited to voluntary citizens’
organizations like the Godless Society. The government was neu-
tral. Incidentally, this was Rykov’s last interview as Premier; soon
thereafter he was replaced by Molotov.

I took Keen to see how the sovereign people was tearing down
the ancient Simionovsky Monastery. The initial dynamiting of the
building, heard everywhere in the capital, was turned into an anti-
religious holiday. Thereafter volunteer brigades of factory work-
ers, communist youths, and children from the Red Pioneer or-
ganizations helped to finish the job. As we picked our way through
the rubble I kicked a round dirt-crusted object aside. It rolled
slowly in front of me and I stared into the empty sockets and
fleshless grin of a skull; there had been burial vaults on the
monastery grounds.

We attended Sunday services in the Cathedral on the Moscow
River and Godless meetings, ate in “factory kitchens,” and photo-

WE MOVE TO A MANSION

^95

graphed, the block-long queues outside food cooperatives. Like all
calm observers, uninvolved emotionally in the revolutionary effort,
Keen was thoroughly impressed with the teeming contrasts of en-
lightened social experiment in a milieu of barbarous cruelty: chil-
dren cared for in creches and children turned into homeless sav-
ages by the liquidation of their parents ; people taught to read
and write while scientists and professors were sent to Siberia for
failure to toe the Marxist line in biology or mathematics 5 new
workers’ clubs and new prisons under construction at the same
time. He wrote a series of articles which showed a deep sympathy
for the sufferings of the Russian people and an appreciation of
the courageous economic tasks undertaken by the Soviet regime.
No matter how perspicacious short-term visitors to the U.S.S.R.
may be, their reactions usually reflect the monitorship under which
they studied the scene.

Miss Jmudskaya stayed fired and I experimented with a suc-
cession of temporary secretaries. There was the handsome Coun-
tess Tolstoy, a niece of the great novelist. And Varvara Ivanovna
Briusilova, daughter-in-law of General Briusilov, now living with
a new husband in what was formerly the bathroom of the General’s
town house. Deeply religious, she remained cheerfully hopeful for
her own and Russia’s future, despite a personal ordeal Job-like in
its complicated miseries. Her life since 1917 had been little more
than a series of imprisonments. Once she had been under sentence
of death for her part in opposing the government’s seizure of
church treasures during the famine year. But her spirit was un-
broken; she continued active in ecclesiastical circles and outspoken
in her detestation of the anti-religious campaign. About 1932, she
was sent to the Solevietsky Islands, the dreaded Arctic prison, for
a ten-year term.

In the end, I engaged a girl recommended by Percy Chen.
Nathalie Petrovna Shirokikh was the daughter of an English
mother and a Russian father. Her mother had come to Russia as
governess to a wealthy family, married a Russian engineer, and
never returned to her native land. After some thirty years, she
was still thoroughly English, spoke Russian with great difficulty,
and felt herself a stranger in the land of revolution. Nathalie,
whose father died early in the revolution, was now the sole sup-
port of the family — a tall, good-looking, life-loving girl un-

DOUBT

296

scarred by the hardships of the years. She developed into one of
the most efficient secretary-interpreters in the American colony and
remains with the United Press bureau to this day.

2

An ill wind that stripped foreign concessionaires of their hold-
ings suddenly blew the Lyons family into undreamed-of comforts.
When the government liquidated the Hammer pencil concession,
it left a residential mansion in Dr. Hammer’s possession. His wife
and sons having returned to America, he decided to rent part of
this space. With a foreign correspondent installed on the premises,
he realized, there was less likelihood that the government would
attempt to take the building over for its own uses. When he pro-
posed that we move in, we naturally grabbed at the chance, pleased
enough to pay any rental for the new amplitude.

Thus, with the advent of spring, we found ourselves settled in
the magnificent Hammer place at Petrovsky Pereulok 8, across the
street from the squat, carrot-red Korsh theater. Moscow’s chari-
table winter mantle of snow was turning ragged. Already the town
showed discolored roof-tops and gaping wounds in the pavements
where only a few weeks ago it sparkled with silver. The diminu-
tive sleds which glided silently through snow-muffled streets were
put away and moth-eaten landaus driven by moth-eaten cabmen
rattled along in their stead.

The winter magic was melting away, but magic enough to be
free at last, after two years, of Sashka’s whining and the flat-
footed flop-plop of our next-door neighbor, free of the gregarious
bedbugs across the corridor and the dripping walls and the need
to climb over a spiked gate at nights. It was good-by to Clean
Ponds Boulevard. For nearly three years — until the English-lan-
guage Moscow Daily News under Michael Borodin invaded the
place and crowded us into a corner — we were to live spaciously in
almost embarrassing comfort.

The house was excessively ornate within and without, its doors
reinforced with elaborate grillwork, its stone fagade tortured with
sculptured decoration, and a broad inner stairway of gleaming
marble spiralling majestically to the upper story. The place was
filled with rococo statuary and paintings, and reindeer heads looked

WE MOVE TO A MANSION 2()J

down in astonishment from the vestibule walls. The generous pro-
portions of all the rooms, especially the immense high-ceilinged
ballroom, represented 1 heady freedom after our cramped years in
a remodeled stable. A former cloakroom off the vestibule was large
enough to serve as my office; a former bedroom, delightfully irreg-
ular in shape, was transformed by Billy's talent for home-making
into a colorful living-room. The vast kitchen, with its oven as
broad as a field, was upstairs and we shared a paneled dining hall
with Dr. Hammer.

Until the revolution, the house had belonged to a Swedish
merchant. His aged Russian widow still lived the life of a recluse
in a wing somewhere on the other side of our wall. Except for
an occasional angry banging when a late party in the ballroom
grew too noisy, we were unaware of this woman's mysterious ex-
istence; I did not see her once in all our four years on Petrovsky
Pereulok — a ghost of the dead past who banged on the wall from
time to time.

In a great many of the old palaces some human fragment of
the former occupants clung to a forgotten room or crevice, some-
times a bewildered old retainer of the family that had fled, some-
times a member of the family itself. On Ulitza Vorovskovo, once
the street of opulent merchants and now lined with embassy resi-
dences, there is a palace occupied by a German diplomat and his
family. Around the ceiling line of its main ballroom is a lovely
frieze of sculptured cherubs, their laughing faces as fresh as life.
In the basement of the palace lived an old, broken-down woman;
she was there when the Embassy took over the building and they
let her stay on. Every now and then the woman came timidly
from her basement and asked permission to remain awhile in
the ballroom. For many long minutes she stared at the cherub
faces. She was the former owner of the palace and the cherubs
had been modeled from her own children by a fashionable sculptor
forty or fifty years ago.

Our luck in entering the Petrovsky Pereulok mansion made us
the envy of the whole press corps. As the largest American home
in Moscow it automatically became a sort of center of social life
in the colony. The fereulok runs between two of the principal
avenues in the center of the city, the Petrovka and the Dmitrovka.
The food shop for diplomats and correspondents was just around

DOUBT

298

the corner on the Dmitrovka, the hotels and the telegraph build-
ings within a few minutes 7 walk. Our lives were suddenly ample
beyond our hopes.

Visiting Americans carried back tall tales of the splendors and
comforts in which we luxuriated. Since it all coincided with a
gloomier tinge in my dispatches, the legend of my “going bour-
geois 77 was now complete.

3

Billy did a few roles in Soviet films. Having had a brief ex-
perience in Hollywood, both the similarities and the contrasts
fascinated her. The “star 77 system was frowned upon at this time 3
the real “prima donnas 77 in the movie “factory 77 were the direc-
tors: Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Preobrezhenskaya, and the rest. A
picture which Hollywood might have pushed through in two or
three months, Moscow worked over for a year or more. The fan-
tastic salaries and sunken bathtubs and million-dollar spectacles of
Hollywood were unknown, but the glamor of the silver screen was
almost as strong upon Russians as upon Americans. Ambitious boys
and girls thronged the studios, struggling newspapermen dreamed
of escape by writing scenarios, third assistant directors and camera-
men were sought after by the girls eager to break into the movies.

Our contacts in the literary world of Moscow were constantly
extended. Pilnyak, Zamyatin,* Nikulin, Lidin, Katayev, his
brother, Petrov, and Petrov’s inseparable collaborator, Ilya Ilf,*
and a number of others were strongly enough entrenched politi-
cally to risk friendship with foreigners.

My reports to Variety fitted into an unfolding interest in
America in Russian films. The exaggerated esteem which Ameri-
can opinion developed for Soviet movies rested largely on pictures
made before the Stalin era had become deeply entrenched, pictures
like Potiomkin } Last Days of St. Petersburg Gorki’s Mother y
Storm Over Asia y October , etc. New York received only the cream
of the film crop from the U.S.S.R.3 it could not suspect how dully
uninspired, how dismally boring, the average Russian film could
be. On the screen, as on the stage and in literature, didactic
propaganda with tractors and factories as heroes and the Five

* Died in 1937.

WE MOVE TO A MANSION 299

Year Plan as the only legitimate passion, had become obligatory.
The George M. Cohan formula of “Mother, me, and the flag”
was, in terms of the Piatiletka, Stalin, and the flag, the only re-
spectable theme.

Always an incredibly heroic communist was thwarted by an in-
credibly villainous counterrevolutionary who was defeated in the
final act while the red sun of revolution rose — rose in literal paste-
board — in the background and the red flag was unfurled triumph-
antly by the victorious shock brigade. Once upon a time, nine out
of ten Russian tales ended with a suicide ; having maneuvered his
people into a hopeless tangle, the author needed merely to choose
among various methods of self-annihilation to bring down his
curtain. Now Russia was as solidly committed to the politico-eco-
nomic happy ending as the Saturday Evening Post is to the ro-
mantic happy ending. Stalin’s Russia was “down” on anything
mystic, cloudy, soft, or morbid. It affected to be through with Slav
fatalism, the “Russian soul,” sentimental moonshine about loves
and doves.

When love figured at all, it was edged with ludicrous or out-
right villainous implications. As soon as a suave factory director
or engineer on stage or screen began to sidle up to somebody
else’s wife, or used honeyed words to the pretty machinist, the
Soviet audience knew that he was cast for the villain’s portion.

There was a picture called, most inappropriately, Real Life ,
made by the White Russian Kino Trust. The heroine was a Com-
somol girl devoted to the “Five Year Plan in Four Years.” Every
time the percentage of widgets turned out by her factory rose,
her features shone with pride. Came the serpent in the alluring
guise of the journalist Sasha and he proffered the apple of love
and Eve-Sonya was tempted and by guile and gallantry did he
lure the working girl to a life of shameful domestic bliss. Eve-
Sonya’s place at the machine was vacant while she cooked kasha
for Sasha. The details of her fall from grace are too sad to relate.
Suffice that the newlyweds sank ever deeper into the slough of
happy comfort, while the percentage of widgets dropped and the
“Five Year Plan in Four Years” trembled in all its figures. No
telling where the tragedy might have ended, if not for the timely
intercession of the scenario writer and the censor. On the brink of,
complacent bourgeois marriage, Sonya realizes the error of her

DOUBT

3 °°

ways. Red bunting blooms on every wall when she returns to
her machine amidst the hosannas of her fellow-workers and the
enthusiastic discords of the cinema pianist, and the widget total
shoots up like Jack’s beanstalk.

You can tempt the upper classes
With your villainous demi-tasses

But censors will protect the working girl.

What happened to Sasha I do not recall, but it was something
drastic enough, I am sure, to cure him of any predilection for
misleading honest working girls into ruinous domesticity.

To demonstrate its ideological loyalty, the Moscow Art The-
atre put on a collectivization drama, Bread y by Vladimir Kirshon.*
It was a Pravda editorial in dramatic form, but such is the skill
of Stanislavsky’s theater that it made a stirring play despite its
machine-made characters. As usual, the stage communist got the
short end in affairs of the heart. The straitlaced communist,
Mikhailov, loses his wife to the unworthy communist, Rayevsky,
but the audience is assured that it isn’t much of a loss. Rayevsky,
just back from Berlin with creased pants and a shiny suitcase, gives
the flighty Olga what she has been thirsting for: gallantries, kisses,
playboy stuff. But those Don Juanesque triumphs are for Trotsky-
ists like Rayevsky and other decayed remnants of the old order,
while strong, unbending builders of the new world like Mikhailov
proceed to rout the dastardly kulaks and the collective marches
forward to the tune of the International. Duty always triumphed
over romantic yearnings, over everything in the Soviet “morali-
ties” that now displaced all other entertainment.

Every now and then even a “morality” turned into an exciting
picture or play or novel. But on the whole the tractors proved as
dully monotonous as brillantined Hollywood Adonises. The Soviet
audiences were sick unto nausea of machine worship. There was a
wild rush for American or German pictures, though they were
flickery thrillers or comics of an early vintage. The only popular
revolt I ever saw in Russia was in a movie house. The night’s pro-
gram began with a news-reel showing factories and electric stations

* Included in Six Soviet Plays, edited by Eugene Lyons, an English anthology
of Soviet drama. Even Kirshon, the type of the conformist literary man, came
under attack as a “Trotskyist bandit” by the end of 1936.

WE MOVE TO A MANSION 301

and shock brigades. Then came a picture named Spring. The title
held the promise of a human story, perhaps a spring of romance.
The audience settled back hopefully. But there were no real
human beings in it at all. The spring of the title was a season
for the opening of new factories and the organization of new col-
lectives: a delirium of pistons, wheels, hammers, factory belts,
photographically admirable but humanly blank. Half the audience
left in loud disgust. The other half remained to hiss and whistle
and catcall.

4

The tragedy of that stifled, gritty period in Soviet art was under-
lined, for me at any rate, by the suicide of the poet Vladimir
Mayakovsky.

Mayakovsky had begun his literary life under tsarism as an
imagist. He welcomed the revolution as unshackling creative ener-
gies and giving a right of way to literary experiment. But he
accepted also its profounder purposes as social change. Unlike a
good many other poets, he harnessed his Muse to the needs of
the new era not only willingly but with loud hurrahs of enthu-
siasm.

If Sergei Yessenin, the lyric playboy of the emotions, repre-
sented the “pure” poet, free and singing, Mayakovsky made of
himself the disciplined poet, who had tamed his talents and used
them like domestic animals to do the work of the revolution. Yes-
senin wrote a farewell note in his own blood and hung himself
in 1925. Mayakovsky wept over that death but castigated that
futile gesture. “In this life it is easy to die,” he wrote, “—to build
life is hard.”

Mayakovsky lived, lived lustily and fully, in the day-to-day
tasks of the harsh years. He jeered at the “Russian soul” and
romantic private emotions. He hammered out hymns to ruthless-
ness, to machinery, to the G.P.U. that was his country’s new Fate,
and he bellowed his disdain for the romanticists and esthetes. His
poems were staccato and shrill, he shrank from no vulgarity, he
dragged the moon and the stars down to earth as raw stuff for
the Five Year Plan.

A tall, broad-shouldered fellow who dressed like an apache,
Mayakovsky gloried in tough-guy gestures and wore the adjective

DOUBT

302

“proletarian” like a challenge to the world. But there was too
much bluster in his attitude to be wholly convincing. In an occa-
sional nostalgic line of rare beauty, in a casual sigh in the very
midst of some blood-and-thunder invocation to duty, he betrayed
the suppressed lyricist and romanticist.

Some of his readers lacked the sharpness of ear to detect the
weeping under his Homeric laughter; others pretended not to
hear. He was accepted as the hard-boiled voice of a hard-boiled
epoch.

And suddenly in April, 1930, the news was out that Maya-
kovsky had killed himself; more shocking than that, killed him-
self because of a silly love affair with a married actress. He left
a shamefacedly flippant note to his comrades on RAPP, indicating
that his “love-boat” had foundered on the shoals of reality. The
man who had made of himself a symbol of impersonal, collecti-
vized emotion, whose derision of bourgeois parlor-and-bedroom
dramas still echoed all around him, died like a Dostoievsky char-
acter. “I know this is not the way out,” he apologized, “I recom-
mend it to no one — but I have no other course.”

Curiously enough, no one thought it strange. In its subconscious
mind, the Russian people had never really believed his bluster.
The denial of the importance of individual happiness, or individual
pain enforced by the Kremlin was only on the surface. The petty
literary dictators pretended to regard the suicide as a sort of fit
of insanity unrelated to the real Mayakovsky; they scolded him
for his despair. Yet they knew what the Russian people felt in-
stinctively: that Mayakovsky’s suicide was the answer to the de-
humanized brutalities which he had himself celebrated.

The poet’s body lay in state at the Writers’ Club and hundreds
of thousands of Muscovites came to pay him honor. His was the
most solemn funeral since Lenin’s; it was not a demonstration by
official edict but a spontaneous outpouring of emotion. The press
might assume that the people were moved by the memory of his
stirring hymns to the G.P.U. and the Five Year Plan. The very
journalists who wrote those assumptions knew better; the people
were moved by that act of desperation which brought Mayakovsky
down from the commanding heights of the ruling supermen to
their own human level of private sorrows. In his death he was
flesh of their flesh.

WE MOVE TO A MANSION

3°3

Some months before he died, he published his last poem, a
curious self-appraisal called With a Full Voice . At the time, its
overtones of despair were lost in the bluster, but now the bluster
fell away and only the overtones could be heard. The poem was
read again as an epitaph, as perhaps he intended it to be read:

cc . . . I am the scavenger and water-carrier, mobilized and called
by the revolution. ... The agit-frof [agitation propaganda work]
stuck in my teeth and it would have been more profitable and beauti-
ful for me to scribble romances for you. But I humbled myself, step-
ping on the throat of my own song. . .

It was the Mayakovsky who wept for his suppressed song whom
the populace followed in reverent affection.

I wrote a piece in which I tried to convey this fact and it was
published in the New Republic. The poet’s suicide, I intimated,
kicked the props from under the new cocksure intelligentsia which
renounces individual feelings “as though communism were some-
how incompatible with the timeless ingredients of life.” Soviet
writers, even those among them who passed as model proletarian
writers, read it and agreed. One of them said it was true, but “this
is too soon to admit it.” But poseurs in the brand-new “pro-
letarian” literary circles in New York were scandalized. They pre-
ferred to believe that the suicide was an accident rather than face
the fact that political labels do not alter the human heart. My
article concluded with these words:

Mayakovsky is dead by his own hand. It is not enough to say, as
already the politicians of literature are saying, that he was too weak
for the fray 5 that he carried over bourgeois tendencies from his past.
It is too easy to patch bewilderment with the ready-made labels of the
agit-frof. It would be better, far better, to admit the full tragedy of
this poet’s inward struggle, to admit the reality and potency of intimate
individual feelings. It would be better, far better, to do so before the
present attitude, the attitude forced upon the new Russia by war and
revolution, hardens into a new insensate skin.

IV. Locomotives Come to Central Asia

AN ODDLY assorted trainload o£ people it was that pulled out
of the Moscow station one day for far-off Central Asia, where the
Turksib — the Turkestan-Siberian Railroad — was about to be
opened officially. There were the two major divisions, Soviet citi-
zens and foreigners, and distinct gradations within each division.
The foreigners were meticulously separated into communists and
infidels. Among the Russians, there were the horny-handed and
stubble-cheeked “shock troopers,” some self-important officials
with brief-cases as the insignia of their position, and a contingent
of the conforming intelligentsia: newspaper reporters, novelists,
playwrights.

It was a microcosm, come to think of it, of the Soviet world and
its capitalist encirclement. The range may be indicated symboli-
cally, at the one end, by the venerable Japanese communist exile,
Katayama, with something of the Oriental priest about his intense
serenity; and at the other end, in our bourgeois wing, by the sar-
torially correct little Japanese diplomat, so polite and affable,
lugging binoculars and a camera nearly as large as himself. An
elegantly accoutered and generously stocked dining car served the
pampered capitalist guests, while a simpler diner and more Spar-
tan fare served the proletarian hosts.

The two camps rarely mixed, though there were both Russians
and foreigners caught embarrassingly between them. Hard, in-
deed, was the plight of certain Soviet writers whose effete tastes
in food, conversation, and women drew them irresistibly to the
bourgeois purlieus of that world on wheels, though their political
allegiance lay with the shock troopers. Nor was the fate of certain
loudly left-wing foreign writers more kindly, to have their corpo-
real selves caught in the cloying comforts of our side while their
ideological souls were four or five cars behind, with the pro-
letarian heroes. There were even sad episodes of political misce-
genation.

304

LOCOMOTIVES COME TO CENTRAL ASIA 2° 5

For over three weeks, these people slept and ate, drank deep
o£ political controversy and headier beverages, flirted and fumed,
within the confines of this special train, closed off from the rest
of the world like a ship at sea. Now and then they flocked to
shore at land-ports like Alma-Ata and Tashkent, Samarkand and
Bokhara, and a score of lesser stations. But always they returned
to the train and its complicated social structure. The class struggle
and the “contradictions” within each class — in living replica like a
traveling exhibit!

A team of Soviet humorists, Eugene Petrov and Ilya Ilf, turned
that journey into chapters of hilarious satire in their novel, The
Tittle Golden Calf . The materials were ready to their hand. The
American newspapermen forever foraging for “stories” and inter-
views. Boris Smolar of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency forever
foraging for Jews — and always finding them, whether in Alma-
Ata or Bokhara or a desert settlement. The battles of gallantry
for the attentions of unattached American females. The factory
workers watching with fascination the antics of strange poker-
playing, beer-drinking, snapshotting outsiders in golf togs. A copy
of Lady Chatterley y s Lover happened to be on board, new at the
start but frayed and dog-eared by the end of the trip, and it added
an amorous aura in the cars where it circulated.

The several married couples had coupes to themselves. Billy’s
charm and seven-stringed guitar, enhanced by a larder of smoked
ham and canned luxuries, made our own compartment at the
extreme end of the correspondents’ car a social center second only
to the dining car itself. Many of the Soviet journalists were lured
into fraternizing with us and the fighting morale of the class war
was badly damaged. The less discreet of the Soviet literary men,
too, took an ideological holiday and spent most of their time in
the bourgeois dining car, in the Lyons den, and in paying court
to good-looking class enemies.

Retribution overtook them before long. The proletarian wing,
of course, had its “wall paper”: a sort of bulletin devoted to the
affairs of the train. Soon it bristled with insinuations pointed at
the wandering literati. “Working class company is not good
enough, it seems, for certain ‘great’ writers in our midst,” the
wall paper said in effect. “They prefer the rostbif and perfumed
ladies in the foreign cars. But we shall fulfill the Piatiletka in

306 doubt

four years despite them. Long live Turksib! Long live Stalin!”

And the great writers sobered instantly j they knew their mas-
ters’ voice. Hurriedly, they organized literary evenings in the
proletarian diner and read excerpts from their books to the shock
troopers and pretended to admire the jejune compositions of young
factory hands with literary ambitions and contributed good-natured
satirical squibs about the foreign correspondents to the wall paper.
For the rest of the journey, they lost no chance to demonstrate
their subservience to our proletarian traveling companions in the
third-class wars.

Several of the left-wing foreigners spent a large part of their
time similarly currying favor with the shock troopers. Social climb-
ing may take different forms in different societies, but remains
equally humorous to an unambitious observer in the sidelines. The
buxom American lady who had just attended a party in the third-
class carriages returned aglow with excitement, like Mrs. Jones
returning from a dinner at the Astorbilts; she had been “ac-
cepted,” thank God!

Before the church domes of Orenburg, that last outpost of
Europe, had quite faded from the western sky, Asia, the ancient
and enigmatic, asserted itself. On either side of our train, the
parched steppes of Kazakstan unrolled to horizons as round as an
o cean. Ragged camels lumbered wearily under heavy loads. Some-
times a string of them crawled on the hairline horizon, silhouetted
against the sky. A lonely yurt — the circular, felt-covered tent of
the Central Asiatic nomads— came into view, or a small colony of
them, like a cluster of mushrooms in the distance. Sometimes a
horseman shaded his eyes under a peaked fur cap and watched
us without curiosity and without answering our greetings.

These seared plains, larger than half of Europe, sparsely cov-
ered with a stubble of sagebrush, support a thin population, less
t han two to the square mile. Their camels and hardy ponies graze
on the desert weeds and provide them with the kunus (mare’s
milk), horse flesh, and camel flesh that are their nourishment.

At the forlorn-looking and widely-separated wayside stations,
unsmiling faces presided over trays of dried fish or withered
vegetables 5 swarthy Kazaks squatted Buddhalike and immobile
against walls and railings — flat-faced, slit-eyed, passive creatures.

LOCOMOTIVES COME TO CENTRAL ASIA 3 OJ

A Mongol world of heat and dust and timeless droning on desert
wilderness. Our trainload of Europeans and Americans, eagerly
curious, restless, were the West 3 and these quiescent, sunbaked
people, slow-moving and indifferent, were the East. We were in
a Mongol world, intruders. Even the lazy flies seemed contem-
plative and Asiatic, astonished by our impatience.

Nearly two days, we jogged along at about twenty miles an
hour across the arid plains from which the heat rose in shimmering
waves. Rarely the country burst into the green of an oasis, more
often it fell off to the yellow of total desert. A day out of Oren-
burg, we had a glimpse of the phosphorescent Aral Sea, its banks
for miles inland streaked with salt. The next day, at the station
of Arys, to the north of Tashkent, the East was upon us in all its
dusty, ill-smelling drabness and nostalgic appeal. This railroad
junction has a mixed population of Russians and natives — Kazaks,
Uzbeks, Kirghiz — and all of these milled in the crowd which
awaited our flag-decked train. But the Russians were blotted out
for us by the picturesque Asians. Their swarthy faces under fur
hats or turbans, their long robes of bright hue or tight-waisted
Kazak coats, evoked echoes of the Bible and the Arabian Nights ;
these were Noahs and Abrahams and young Aladdins out of child-
hood picture books.

Their immediate concerns, however, were a lot more up-to-
date. They talked of collectivization: how cruel local tyrants, Rus-
sian and native, had been forcing them into socialized farms; of
the terrible shortage of food. The rumor had spread through all
their world that a the government” was coming from Moscow
and these people had awaited our arrival for days, brimming over
with questions and complaints and elaborate petitions for Stalin
and Kalinin. A delegation clamored for an immediate conference
with Lenin and Trotsky. Deep was their chagrin and their doubt
when informed that this was not “the government” at all but an
assortment of people from many lands come to see a new railroad
riveted upon an ancient land.

At other stopping places these scenes were repeated. Central
Asia, allowed by the tsar to go on its own primitive way, was being
vigorously shaken up by Bolshevik innovations. Women were be-
ing taught to make bonfires of their veils and Comsomol children
to flout the traditions of their fathers. Worse than that, their herds

308 doubt

and their lands were being seized and men turned into laborers
on the land they once owned. It was here that “military force,”
according to Stalin himself, had been used to make collectives,
here that officials had denied the precious irrigation water to indi-
vidual farmers.

The country turned greener as we proceeded northward, and
on either hand mountains soon lifted silver peaks against deep
blue skies.

2

The final meeting of the northern and southern sections of the
Turkestan-Siberian Railroad, on April 28, 1930, will never be
forgotten by those who witnessed it. The hackneyed contrast of
East and West, of primitive life and modern science, was no
longer hackneyed but a pageant epic in extent and in depth.

The spot called Aina-Bulak was no more than a name in the
void, without so much as a railroad station as yet to mark it.
When the work was begun in 1927 from opposite directions, no
one could have foretold precisely where the rails would meet.
But a more effective theater for that event could scarcely have
been selected by a great stage director. Mountains on all sides
formed a natural amphitheater. A huge grandstand had been
erected on one side of the rails and it was crowded with dele-
gations from all corners of the Soviet land 5 streamers of bunting
all around the stand shouted the coming of the new life to Cen-
tral Asia. On the other side of the rails, massed on sloping ground,
were Kazak horsemen by the thousand; men with inscrutable ex-
pressions, immobile on their mounts as though man and horse
were one; their padded coats flaring from tight waistlines to
show colored robes and pantaloons underneath. Hundreds of
Kazak women were there, too, most of them with infants slung
on their backs; they gazed shyly from under foot-high turbans.

Early that morning, a silver spike was driven into the tie which
completed the railroad. Russian, Kazak, and foreign representa-
tives added hammer blows to that ceremony, and then a loco-
motive plastered with slogans and alive with flags puffed slowly
over the stretch of rail that included the juncture.

A meeting followed. For five hours, thousands sat on hard
benches and on horseback while government and Party spokesmen

LOCOMOTIVES COME TO CENTRAL ASIA 309

in many tongues eulogized the railroad and the power of the
Soviets. Loud-speakers carried their voices to the outermost fringe
of the crowd. An airplane circled overhead. The sun rose higher
in the sky and beat down fiercely, but no one stirred except to
cheer the speeches and the men who were decorated with the Red
Banner of Labor for their share in building the Turksib.

Even to us, for whom locomotives and loud-speakers and air-
planes were commonplaces, the spectacle was exciting. How much
more so to these Kazaks from the hillsides and the desert places!
A few of them came timidly to our diner later and grew as ex-
cited as children when they saw their own faces in a mirror.
Locomotives and airplanes for people who had never seen a mirror!

Of the mammoth enterprises of the Five Year Plan the Turksib
was the first to be finished. The work was rushed so that the cere-
monial might coincide with the May Day holidays and the reports
of this “victory on the front of industrialization” might be spread
before the nation as it turned out for the spring demonstrations.
Though this priority was accidental, it had its symbolic implica-
tions. In its great effort to industrialize, Russia was drawing upon
the technique of the West, but its face was turned to the East.
The course of its empire, in terms of ultimate export markets for
the products of its new machines and ultimate influence for the
ideas of its new social system, flowed in that direction. The great
struggle for the pocket-books and the minds of Asia’s millions will
unquestionably shape world history in the next few generations,
and in Turksib the Soviet land had fashioned a powerful new in-
strument for that tussle. Missionary zeal and economic self-interest
have ever gone hand in hand.

The hero of this fervid but uncomfortably hot pageant was
Vladimir Sergeyevich Shatoff, known to his myriad American
friends as “Bill” Shatoff. His personality, indeed, was one of the
most memorable things we met in this wilderness of hill and plain.
The Order pinned on his shirt was a trivial thing compared with
the childlike adulation with which he seemed to be regarded
throughout Kazakstan.

Bill Shatoff was twenty when he went to the United States in
1907. He worked as printer, tinsmith, common laborer. He rode
freight-cars with other migratory workers and became active in
the I.W.W. organization. He led strikes and made speeches and

DOUBT

3 10

fought American capitalism in the front trenches of the class
struggle. But at the same time he learned the lessons that Ameri-
can capitalism could teach him. When he returned to his native
land in 1917 to help along the revolution, he was saturated with
that peculiarly American driving force and constructive energy.
At first he commanded armies of volunteers and brought order
out of chaos as police chief of Petrograd. Then, with the end of
the civil wars, he turned his dynamic Americanism to the peace-
time tasks of industrial life. A stout, chunky man, breezy and
good-natured, he was adopted by the American correspondents as
their very own. His English brimmed over with juicy American-
isms ten or fifteen years out of date.

At ShatofPs temporary home in Alma-Ata, I found an Ameri-
can oasis in that Asiatic desert: a shelf of American books, a pile
of recent American jazz records. But most characteristic of all were
the framed aphorisms on his walls: American verses which would
have gone straight to the heart of any Rotarian in Kalamazoo or
Los Angeles: verses celebrating “stick-to-it-iveness,” punctuality,
hard work. The I.W.W. agitator turned builder, bringing the
slogans of an American “boom” to arid Asia. Already he was
impatient to begin a new job of industrial conquest somewhere.

His American years were fresh in his mind. He questioned me
about Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, “the Saint” (Vincent St. John),
and others of his old friends and comrades-in-arms. His face lighted
up in remembrance of daring deeds and futile gestures in the
brave “Wobbly days.” Billy led in the singing of Wobbly songs:
Hallelujah , Pm a Bum , and Hold the Fort for We Are Coming
and Oh y Mr. Block) You Were Born by Mistake. In the radical
atmosphere evoked at this party in the Shatoff home, it was a
little shocking to realize that some of the guests, formerly influ-
ential communists, were here in Kazakstan as exiles because of
their political views — “on vacation,” as one of them explained in
a low voice, not without bitterness.

After the ceremonial meeting, a great feast was spread in the
open air, in which some five thousand took part. The Europeans
sat at long rough tables, and the natives sat cross-legged on the
ground and* on immense wooden platforms. Billy and I and a
few other Americans joined the squatters and took snapshots to

LOCOMOTIVES COME TO CENTRAL ASIA 3 I I

record the meal. Rice and dried fruit, mutton and kumis> were
plentiful this day.

Then the horsemen worked off their accumulated excitement in
mass races and fierce contests of agility and endurance, with gaily
colored calico and tea as the prizes. Their shrieks filled the air.
We watched thousands of them racing enormous distances, or
fighting cruelly with blood-curdling yowls in what seemed to us
more like a primitive free-for-all than a game. This was the species
of men who seven hundred years ago had dominated an empire
larger than Rome’s.

It required an effort to place this horde back into the contem-
porary picture— Soviet citizens to be regimented into the ranks
of proletarians and proletarianized farmers, to be drawn without
interlude or transition into the pattern of an industrialized socialist
state. At least, as one of the communist officials in our party put
it, “they have nothing to unlearn.” There was a deep truth in
that observation. Here there were no capitalist classes to clear away,
no capitalist habits of thought to dislodge. The struggle for sheer
existence has been so bitter, the standard of living so desperately
low, that the gifts of socialist industry will seem attractive, no
matter how meager they may appear in European eyes. Also,
arbitrary rule by outsiders has been their lot so long that they
accept it meekly, almost as a divine visitation.

To speak of a “proletarian dictatorship” from within Central
Asia is the rankest nonsense, since the revolution found no pro-
letarians to act as dictators. The dictatorship is from without, a
civilizing agency from the industrialized West, imposing an alien
economic set-up and alien ideas upon backward, bewildered, and
frequently reluctant peoples. This agency is creating a local pro-
letariat and educating it to the communist viewpoints as a native
support for the dictatorship. The U.S.S.R. needs the cotton, the
rubber, the other products, that Central Asia, properly reorgan-
ized, may provide in abundance.

Reports of the Aina-Bulak celebration, the marvels of the “black
iron horse,” the great feast spread for multitudes, were carried
back by the horsemen to the yurtas scattered over Central Asia.
Heroic legends will flourish around the names of Lenin and Stalin
and Shatoff, no less stirring than those recounted century after
century about the great Timur and Genghis Khan. Perhaps Bill

DOUBT

312

Shatoff, who rode the rods in America, will rank in the Kirghiz
fables by the side of Tamerlane. Who can guess which of these
heroes, the old warriors or the new builders, will affect Central
Asia more?

3

Alma-Ata, where we saw the May Day demonstration, already
showed the effects of this boom in the desert. Two years earlier,
it seemed a suitable place of exile for a man like Trotsky, remote
from civilization, inaccessible. Now, it was on a main highroad to
Siberia and to Europe, its population of eighty thousand nearly
double what it had been during Trotsky’s enforced sojourn.

Certainly Trotsky’s residence made small impression upon Alma-
Ata. Scarcely anyone knew where he had lived. Soviet officials
gave us no encouragement in hunting down this “story,” although
they put no obstacles in our way and allowed our cables on the
subject to pass unaltered. The address, Krassin Street 75, was
whispered from ear to ear like the address of a speakeasy, and
the foreign correspondents, singly and in groups, stole to the place,
a little furtively, to talk to neighbors and photograph the house.

We found that even the working-class families now living in
the six-roomed, two-storyed house where Trotsky spent a year,
were not thrilled by the distinction. Lev Davidovich and his family
had been and were gone, so what of it? Neighbors remembered
him as a pleasant, affectionate man engrossed in his writing, who
went often into the hills to hunt. They recalled that in the last
months of his stay he seemed morose and complained more often
against his unbearable inactivity. But they did not realize the
excitement that his comings and goings caused throughout the
world and wondered why thirty correspondents, from distant
America and England and Germany, should want to see the white-
washed rooms where Trotsky had lived.

The wide poplar-shaded streets of the New City, or Russian
section of Tashkent, are no longer bright with gold-braided and
epauleted emissaries from St. Petersburg. They are brisk with
portfolio-bearing functionaries, as in any other Soviet town, but
a good many of them are dark-skinned Uzbeks, their flapping
native robes replaced by ill-fitting factory-made coats and trousers.

LOCOMOTIVES COME TO CENTRAL ASIA 3 I 3

The meek horses dragging bizarre carts o£ the region — enormous
wheels eight feet high, the drivers crouched on the horse rather
than the cart — are getting used to the speeding horseless monsters.

Deep and far-reaching as this intrusion of the West may be —
and it is an intrusion that was well under way long before the
revolution — it has left the surface of the Old City, the real Tash-
kent, overwhelmingly Oriental. You glance down a muddy alley
between the blind walls of its windowless homes and you might
easily be gazing at a street in Jerusalem two thousand years ago.
A veiled woman comes toward you, covered from the crown of
her head to the ground by a shapeless gray -paranja , a black im-
penetrable horsehair veil over her face, like a hideous walking
pillar, scarcely human. Huge men jog along on donkeys half their
own size, their thick calves contrasting with the spindly legs of
the animal. A bearded Uzbek strides toward you, his gaily striped
robe flapping in the mud.

Curiously enough, the most Soviet things in the Old City were
the straggly queues stretching from government bakeries and co-
operative food shops; women, veiled and unveiled, clutching their
ration books exactly as in Moscow or Kiev.

A concert at the Radio Center deepened our sense of the new
life seeping into the substance of the old. Folk songs played on
the long native flutes gave way to something which, with an
effort, we recognized as the International . Uzbek children, with
the red kerchief of the Pioneers around their necks, sang ancient
tunes with new words that scorned the ways of their backward
parents. Two girls, their pitch-black hair twisted patiently into a
hundred thin braids, danced the slow coquettish Uzbek dances,
eyes flashing, limbs winking, like little Salomes, but as they danced
they fitted new songs about freedom to the old erotic rhythms.
Not for them marriage by barter, the harem, and the imprison-
ment of a paranja.

Some years before the revolution, another such girl had been
sold at twelve into marriage to a man five times her age. From
the primitive Moslem home of a poor peasant she entered the
well-stocked harem as fourth wife. Instead of settling down to
long-suffering wifehood, she listened to the undefined stirrings in
her young mind, even as a million other girls sold into polyg-
amous households and shut from the world must have listened.

DOUBT

3*4

For two years this child endured her prison. Then she ran away
to Tashkent. It was no mere school-girl escapade. A brutal death
at the hands of her husband and his relatives must be her portion
if she were caught 3 such insult can be wiped out only in blood.
But the urge of a freedom-loving mind was stronger than the fear
of death. For several years she shifted for herself in the Old City
of Tashkent, outcast, homeless, on the thin edge of starvation, but
learning somehow to read and to write and saturating herself with
a great ambition for her bonded sisters.

Then came the revolution. Her passion flowered into a gift of
oratory. Her knock-about life had hardened her courage and prac-
tical abilities. She was active in establishing the Soviet power and
was soon as idolized by the new Uzbek women as she was detested
by the mullahs and land-owning beys. Her hair clipped in man-
nish style, a cigarette defiantly between her full lips, a military
coat over her trim figure, she became the symbol incarnate of the
emancipated woman, in a world where women were chattels of
their male owners.

And now — in her early thirties, good-looking, the flame of her
personality burning high — she was Vice-President of the Soviet
Republic of Uzbekistan, of which ancient Samarkand is the new
capital. Comrade Abidova! It was she who greeted our special
train when we reached Samarkand. The suffragette and women’s
rights movements of the West are amusing parlor games compared
with the grim struggle carried on by these Central Asiatic women.
Death and torture, at the hands of those whose religious fanati-
cism or class honor is inflamed by the new propaganda, are so
frequent that they are no longer news. One such woman who went
into dark villages to preach emancipation was returned to the city
cut to pieces in a sack on which was the inscription: “There’s your
women’s freedom.”

Comrade Abidova was frankly scornful of our eagerness to see
the remnants of the old civilization, when we could look at a new
irrigation system, hospitals and clubs, silk mills and day nurseries.
What cared bob-haired Abidova for the last resting place of the
adored Bibi or the sky-blue old medreshesf She seemed non-
plused by our infidel indifference to the new shrines and medreshes
of industrialization. We managed, however, to see both the old
and the new, and each gained in vividness because of the other.

LOCOMOTIVES COME TO CENTRAL ASIA 3 I 5

Samarkand had been the goal of conquerors, of whom Alexan-
der the Great is the first known to history. After him came the
Tadjiks, who left their language and much of their culture 3 next
the Arabs, to be followed by the Turks. Then all of them were
covered by the flood-tide out of Mongolia, under Genghis Khan,
and under Tamerlane two centuries later. With the disintegration
of Mongolian rule, the city was governed by local Emirs until
conquered by Russia in the 1870’s.

Of them all, the imprint of Tamerlane is strongest. He loved
his Samarkand and lavished upon it his choicest spoils. He brought
the most skilled artisans of Asia, and even Europe, to build its
mosques and tombs and religious schools. The ruins of those
monuments to his fame and his expansive taste still dominate
old Samarkand, which, like old Tashkent, seems unrelated to the
new Russian city.

We walked through the old city like people inspecting a half-
remembered dream. This East, crowded, odoriferous, colorful, is
a common memory for all of us: the source of our religion, our
folk-lore, our deepest nostalgia. We went through the winding
bazaar; through the street of the cap-makers, ablaze with gold
and silver and purple skull-caps; the street of the silversmiths,
filled with gorgeous confections of semi-precious stones set in sil-
ver; the streets of coppersmiths, silk dealers, and cobblers. The
narrow alleys were thick with buyers and sellers. Tall Uzbek lads
balanced on their heads trays piled high with small, flat bread
loaves. Water carriers threaded through the crowds. The long
multi-colored robes, the turbans and skull-caps, even the somber
triangles of horsehair veils contributed to a scene that remains
electric in memory.

A short dozen years ago, the eight miles of earthen wall running
around Bokhara inclosed the quintessence of the East. Barbarous
splendor and fearful dirt flourished undisturbed. The tsar’s be-
nevolent supervision left the reigning Emir, whose son I had met
in Moscow, an absolute monarch in all local matters; an obese,
bearded, splendiferous person amidst his fabulous wealth, his vast
harem, and his boy concubines. Merchant princes lived in a style
reminiscent of the Arabian Nights . Jews wore signs of their deg-
radation and dared not ride while Moslem walked, but many

DOUBT

316

of them were enormously rich and their girdles of servitude were
spun of fine gold. Next to Mecca, this was the holiest city, its
Oriental face unblemished by a single modernism ; its first fac-
tory was not built until 1928.

And Bokhara was still exotic enough to thrill a Westerner to
the quick. The miles of intertwined alleys, some of them covered,
here and there knotted under old arches ; the tangle of traffic on
donkeys, horses, camels, high- wheeled carts 5 the stagnant water
reservoirs 5 the long rows of box-like shops; the tangle of ham-
mering and shouting: something desperately ancient, grown in
upon itself. There was as yet no New City, though hundreds of
Russian families had come to live within the sacred walls.

The Emiris palace itself, a large earthen fortress enclosing many
ugly and pretentious buildings, is now the seat of the regional
executive committee of the government. But the harem grounds
and palaces were being used as a sanatorium for mentally defective
women — an Oriental insult, perhaps, to the liquidated past. Once
the fat Emir watched his concubines disport themselves in the
pool. Now the pool was a dry basin, empty except for dust and
debris.

At night, the charm of Bokhara was deepened by a sense of
mystery and danger. We ignored the queues waiting for bread
and the few new buildings and were aware only of the brooding
East. As we lost ourselves in the winding alleys, we stopped before
chai-khannas and listened to the melancholy tunes plucked from
curious stringed instruments; even the beggars displaying their
loathsome wounds fitted into the picture. Then we wandered acci-
dentally into a hall where several hundred Russians and Uzbeks
were discussing heatedly the problems of the local cooperative
shops.

The picturesqueness of Bokhara is crumbling. It is doomed.
The medieval life nurtured on rich trade is no more and there
seems no good reason for its survival. The rich brocades, silks,
copperware, rugs, and jewels remaining from the old days are
being confiscated or bought up by government agents for export
to Fifth Avenue and Rue de la Paix and the Strand. The thirty
correspondents and other foreigners helped the process immensely
by stocking up on embroidered robes, wall hangings, and bits of
jewelry. As regional center, with a few factories, it will retain

LOCOMOTIVES COME TO CENTRAL ASIA 317

some population no doubt. But Bokhara — “high, holy, divinely de-
scended Bokhara” — will dwindle to a drab provincial town.

4

The taste of Central Asia was strong on my mind’s palate when
I returned to Moscow. I had seen a proletarian revolution under
way in a vast territory without a proletariat: whose first task, in
fact, is to create a working class in the Marxist sense. Exceptional
as its forms may be, it was the modern West of machines and
literacy and women’s rights roughly elbowing aside the East 5
even as Western civilization is blotting out the East elsewhere in
Asia.

There were lusty debates in the bourgeois cars on the return
trip as to whether what we had witnessed was a sort of “Soviet
imperialism.” A British writer argued that the differences between
Moscow’s role in Bokhara and London’s role in Bagdad were more
of seeming than of essence.

“These people may accept Soviet industrial blessings and new
ideas,” he argued. “I have seen thousands of Indians who accept
the British blessings and ways of life quite as enthusiastically.
But in both cases it is change imposed by a foreign conqueror, not
change springing from the heart of the old civilization.”

“Except that the natives will get the benefit of all that is being
done,” someone objected, “instead of filling the pockets of foreign
capitalists.”

“What you mean,” the Englishman smiled, “is that Soviet
Russian rule is good for these backward people, and I agree with
you. In fact, that’s exactly what a British imperialist says of his
particular method of bringing civilization tO' the uncivilized. As
for the lining of foreign pockets, let’s be realistic like good Bol-
sheviks. European Russia needs its Asiatic colonies quite as much
as England needs Egypt or India, for its own economic interests.
Central Asia must supply Russia with cotton above all other
things, to make it independent of American and British cotton.
All those plans they told us about in the interviews amount to
exactly that.”

“But Central Asia has local self-government. The heads of the
government are natives. Remember Comrade Abidova.”

DOUBT

3 1 8

“Sure, but that’s old stuff/’ the Englishman persisted. “We
Britishers are past masters in the local self-government stuff. All
we need is a line of carefully located army garrisons, and you’ve
noticed that the Red Army garrisons are pretty much in evidence
too.”

The argument remained unsettled.

At a small station somewhere on the Asiatic side of Orenburg,
we noticed a long train of freight cars on a siding, G.P.U. sol-
diers with fixed bayonets standing guard near it. The word spread
through our own cars that a trainload of liquidated kulaks was
there, as if for our inspection. Neither the soldiers nor the officials
in our midst could very well prevent us from approaching the
human freight. Small apertures high up at one end of the cars
were the only source of air and light for the hundreds of men,
women, and children jammed into the prison cars. These apertures
were now crowded with peasant faces, craning for a view of the
station full of foreigners: weary, hopeless faces deeply ingrained
with dirt.

“Where are you going?” I addressed myself to a batch of the
prisoners.

“We don’t know,” one of them replied.

“They say,” another added, “that we’re being taken to Turkestan
— to the canals.”

The same irrigation canals of which Abidova and other officials
were so proud! This was the other side of the medal. Whatever
Stalin’s article on “dizziness from success” may have done to
protect the poorest peasants against excessive force, the liquidation
of kulaks was still going on — it would go on for two- more years.

“But why are you being taken there?” I asked.

“Because we’re kulaks,” an emaciated-looking woman replied.

No one among her fellow-prisoners contradicted her. These
creatures did not even dispute the right of the government to de-
prive them of everything, pack them into cars, and haul them into
Central Asia to dig canals. Government was something too far
away, too omnipotent to be questioned 5 its decrees were like the
decrees of nature, part of a harsh destiny. This acceptance of their
fate in a sort of bovine stupor seemed more horrible than liquida-
tion itself, it explained why the Kremlin could carry out policies
which elsewhere would have stirred irrepressible mutiny.

LOCOMOTIVES COME TO CENTRAL ASIA 319

The impress of this accidental confrontation with a contingent
of exiles was as sharp as anything that we had seen in the crowded,
exciting journey. I have found its traces since then in the books
and articles written by many of the foreigners in our cars.

The relations between Russians and non-Russians on our train
became tenser, more inhibited, the closer we came to Moscow.
Fraternization became more risky, political barriers more intimidat-
ing. Friendships had developed among many of us, but we all
knew that they could not be continued in the capital $ it was too
dangerous for the Russians.

A few days after we abandoned the train, all the Russian jour-
nalists and literary men who had been with us gathered in the
ballroom of our house on Petrovsky Pereulok. The Russians
consented to have present only one foreigner aside from Billy
and myself, and that at our insistence. It was a gay, noisy, friendly
party which did not break up until far beyond dawn.

At the door, as he gripped my hand in saying good night, a
young communist newspaperman said quietly:

“What a pity that we cannot continue these friendships. Maybe,
some day, it will be possible. . . .”

V. Search for the “Real Russia”

THE Moscow River broke through its straitjacket of ice and
hurled sparkling boulders on the banks. Hundreds of people leaned
over the balustrades and lingered on the bridges watching the
ice crash and tangle as it moved down the river. Behind them
the gold and blue and orange cupolas and towers of the Kremlin
splintered the sunshine. The skeleton trees on the botdevards sud-
denly burst into tender green buds. Winter was turning into sum-
mer without the formality of a real spring.

Padded coats and felt boots were abandoned for tolstovkas
and patched leather boots, cotton sarafans and canvas shoes.
Peasant nursemaids pushed home-made perambulators— egg-boxes
on wheels — along the broad paths of Alexandrovsky Park under
the crenelated north wall of the Kremlin, and before long they
had an escort of laughing Red soldiers. On the Tverskoi Boule-
vard, between the statues of Pushkin and Gogol, an ancient and
faded carrousel was turned by hand to cracked music-box tunes,
while its tiny passengers shrieked their delight. Other children
were taking rides in the roomy saddle-pockets on either side of a
weary camel. Blushing couples were being photographed against
crudely drawn backgrounds of waterfalls or pillared palaces.

I lost myself in the turgid, tangled currents of pedestrians, most
of whom carried parcels in dirty newspapers or clutched brief-
cases. Despite the disguise of a Russian blouse, the beggars spotted
me as a foreigner and wailed aloud, “Little uncle, give me bread! ”
I entered shops where crowds milled around in dizzy futility near
vacant counters under vacant shelves. In the large department
stores, bold signs announced the goods that were not there; only
the corners given over to busts and tinted lithographs of Lenin,
Stalin, and Marx were always well stocked. Outside the windows
of the special “closed” shops and restaurants reserved for favored
categories of citizens, little knots of people watched silently as
the fortunate ones came and went. Everywhere the crowds over-

320

SEARCH FOR THE a REAL RUSSIA” 321

flowed the sidewalks and shiny automobiles plowed through them
like speedboats cutting water.

At night, the Hermitage and Aquarium, amusement parks, were
filled with promenading people, young and old 5 girls in starched
shirtwaists, red kerchiefs or berets 3 young men with scrubbed
faces and oiled boots. I paid the admission price and sat over stale
weak beer at little tables covered with grimy cloths and smiled
back at coquettish girls. A rumble of applause came from behind
the high canvas wall where an open-air vaudeville show was
going on. Between the acts of Rose Marie people streamed out
of the theater and joined the concentric circles of promenaders,
moving in opposite directions for easier mutual inspection.

Though all other squares and boulevards were jammed and
noisy, Red Square was always deserted at night. Pedestrians
walked through briskly and izvozchiki whipped up their horses 3
no one loitered except occasionally foreigners from the hotels
nearby. It seemed detached from the city’s life, hushed under the
stars like an autumnal field. St. Basil’s Cathedral, a cluster of queer
mushrooms, loomed against the night sky, unrelated to the Krem-
lin walls on one side, the severely angular tomb of Lenin under
it, and the squat elongated building on the other side. Soldiers
stood immobile with fixed bayonets at the tomb and at little
booths near the two arched gates to the Kremlin. Every fifteen
minutes the clock tower overlooking the execution block chimed
the time. On the Kremlin wall just beyond the mausoleum, a red
flag flapping in the breeze was lit up from below. It seemed the
only live thing on the Square: a red tongue of fire hissing de-
fiance at the dead gold eagles immolated on high at both ends of
the walls, a red tongue mocking the stillness below and above.
At midnight the clock tower chimed the International and the
notes were carried through the ether to radio loud speakers
throughout Moscow.

2

lzvozchiki y the drivers of dilapidated sleds and carriages, had
practically disappeared from the streets of the nation during the
fierce attack on kulaks and “kulak agents.” Their reappearance
helped the back-to-normalcy atmosphere which prevailed briefly
in the capital. After Stalin’s “dizziness” article, those who had

DOUBT

322

not killed or sold their horses ventured from their hiding places*

With that easy optimism which is an aspect of ultimate despair,
remnants of the private traders dared come again into the city’s
markets. Doctors and dentists became less fearful of private prac-
tice. Pre-revolutionary educated people lifted their heads a little
more hopefully.

Peasants deserted the collectives as rapidly and more joyously
than they had entered them. In Moscow province, for instance,
of 75% of the peasantry collectivized only 25% remained; this
according to Pravda. In thousands of villages, indeed, there was
no need for de-collectivization; the socialization was only on paper
anyhow. The Easter services, crowded as usual, were subdued,
but there were no hostile demonstrations like the year before. The
Godless Society contented itself with free theatrical performances,
movies, lectures, and even dances, to divert the youth from church
attendance.

The gods, it seemed, as well as the godless, had relented. Our
cables reflected the more cheerful mood. But the optimism was
short-lived. The Kremlin had no intention of being robbed of its
victories on the agrarian front. Having deflated paper collectives
and warned against a few of the grosser excesses, it renewed the
campaign. For about six months, until the new harvest was in, a
measure of discretion was desirable; local “hotheads” must be
kept in check. Then they would be given free rein once more.
The “artel” type of collective — in which the peasant retained his
home, a garden plot, a cow, and smaller domestic animals — was
now made standard, rather than the fully communized type.
Liquidation did not cease. Cargoes of kulaks continued to be un-
loaded wherever labor was most needed. It was a neat arrange-
ment: free land, horses, and tools for the collectives at one end,
free labor for the lumber industry and construction jobs at the
other end.

The entire process of rural socialization by this time had a
different physiognomy than envisioned by the Kremlin a year or
two earlier. Then the collectives were pictured as islands of
prosperity in the oceanic expanse of agrarian misery. The gov-
ernment would see to it that the kolkhozes prospered. The whole
weight of bank credits, tractors, selected seeds would be on their
side, plus the property seized from the class enemies. Manufac-

SEARCH FOR THE a REAL RUSSIA 55 323

tured goods, schools, libraries, radio, motion picture theaters would
bring the benefits of urban culture to the peasants who relin-
quished their individualistic prejudices. These idyllic promises
filled the press and the speeches. Private farmers would watch
their thriving socialized neighbors grow fat. Soon enough they
would beg for the privilege of admission.

The very success of the pressure, however, killed the idyl. With
four or five times as many collectives on its hands as originally
planned, the government was swamped 3 it could not help them to
prosper. There were not enough competent directors, machinery,
seeds, or culture to go around. The wholesale destruction of draft
animals sharpened these shortages, and the apathy of peasants
who felt themselves coerced or tricked into collectivization did
the rest to make the kolkhoz member for the time being a poorer,
more wretched mortal than his impoverished private neighbors.
The natural extension of the movement which was to have come
by dint of example was now out of question 3 force — now more,
now less, but naked force — remained the chief and often sole
technique of agricultural socialization.

Abroad, and among the more naively rapturous foreigners in
Moscow, the kolkhoz was regarded as a glorified cooperative. How-
ever exorbitant the cost, it was assumed, at least a beginning had
been made in socialism on the land. Nothing can be farther from
the truth. In essence, the kolkhoz is no more socialistic than farms
cultivated for the church or the crown in other countries, paying
their farmhands on the basis of the crops produced: share crop-
ping for the government. Every detail of management — -the acreage
and crops to be sown, the disposal of the crops, payment to the
peasant workers, etc. — was decided at central headquarters, in Mos-
cow, Kharkov, and Rostov, often stupidly and uneconomically. The
directors were sent by headquarters and were not responsible
to anyone else. The kolkhoz was denied the right to own tractors
and other machinery. Everything was concentrated in Machine
Tractor Stations and rented to the collective in return for 20 to
30% of its total crops. The peasant was a collective owner largely
in the sense that a hired laborer on government land anywhere
is theoretically a part owner of that land.

“In the old days we worked for landlords, 55 peasants put it

DOUBT

324

bluntly, “now we work for the government. What’s the differ-
ence?”

Whatever collectivization might promise theoretically for the
future, in the here and now it amounted, in the view of the or-
dinary p easan t, to a restoration of the serfdom abolished seventy
years before by Alexander II. It is essential to understand this
if the turbulent war between the collectivized peasants and its
omnipotent absentee landlord, the state, in the next few years,
costing millions of lives, is to make sense.

3

Conscientious foreign observers considered it their duty to make
contacts with Workers and Peasants and Real Communists. They
went to endless trouble to meet exemplars of these capitalized
classes socially, paying court to genuine factory workers or col-
lectivized farmers who happened on their path.

“The trouble,” they were always being told, “is that you don’t
know the real Russia, but just a lot of left-overs from the past.”
The rebuke bored deep into their conscience. They searched for
that mysterious “real Russia.”

Of course, there were the proletarians one saw in the streets
and on queues, on trams and in busses 5 the crippled dvornik who
came sleepily to open the gate at night; the peasants who hauled
your load of firewood from the lumber yard. There were the
communists with whom you dealt in offices in the regular course
of business or met at official Soviet functions. But somehow they
did not measure up to the “real thing;” they belonged to the
gray, drab, unsmiling mass on sidewalks and street cars, rather
than the brave new breed in Izvestia editorials, Meierhold plays,
and Eisenstein movies.

I lost no opportunity for meeting the “real thing.” If callous-
handed citizens showed an inclination to associate with a humble
boorzhooy, they met an eager welcome. Usually they proved dis-
appointing: the kind of people who, if put into a proletarian novel,
would bar it from publication.

Consider the case of Piotr, a carpenter in burlap apron, who
came into our lives briefly to build bookshelves in my office on
his free days and evenings; a regulation shock brigadier if ever

SEARCH FOR THE <C REAL RUSSIA 55 325

there was one, newly literate, a candidate for Party membership.
At first he was cagey and correct in his political opinions, but
quickly enough drifted into a vein of bitter complaint against
nearly everything. He had a way of referring to “nashy noviye
bary ” — “our new overlords” — which disqualified him for Eisen-
stein and Meierhold. When I pressed him for the source of his
wood, a deficit product, he admitted with a wink that he helped
himself at the warehouse of the noviye bary: G.P.U. officials for
whom he was doing some carpentering.

Or consider the still more distressing case of plump Irina, from
the Tri-Ugolny Textile factory. A New York communist brought
her to the house one day by way of exhibiting the genuine article
in the line of proletarian youth. She returned again and again,
enchanted with Billy’s rendition of Russian folk songs and Rus-
sian meat cakes. Here at last was a factory “activist,” a Com-
somolka raised under the hammer and sickle, suckled by the revo-
lution, her portrait once in Ogoniok as an outstanding pace-setter.
But she showed an eager and unorthodox interest in jazz dancing,
European clothes, and off-color ditties not prescribed in the Com-
somol catechism.

The fourteen-carat Proletarian had a curious way of disclosing
wide brass streaks on closer assay; of turning, in short, into a nor-
mal workman who feared his director, resented speed-up tricks,
and was more interested in pig than in pig-iron. Like workers the
world over, and this was always disconcerting, he dreamed that
his sons at least would escape the fate of proletarians by becom-
ing policemen or communist officials. If his boy was an active Com-
somol, he mentioned it proudly as a matter of career rather than
revolutionary ideals, much as an American father might boast
that his son was getting on in the world as a stock salesman or
political henchman.

The “real thing” was always one step removed from the workers
and peasants one actually came to know. The exceptionally en-
thusiastic worker at a factory bench or on a farm developed, on
closer acquaintance, to be simply more ambitious than his fellow-
workers. The “activist” attending all the meetings, whooping it
up for the new government loan, proposing higher labor quotas,
and organizing volunteer groups to go weeding on some kolkho%

DOUBT

326

or to help demolish a monastery was curiously like the pep-it-up-
team-work-factory-spirit fellows I knew at home, and equally de-
tested by his clock-watching fellow-workers.

The fact, of course, is that the simon-pure Proletarian was a
figment of the propagandist imagination: a projection of the ideal
worker-to-be in an ideal society-to-be. The hero of half the plays
and pictures and novels was as synthetic a creature as the heroes
of wishful-thinking literature under any system. He was signifi-
cant as a rough sketch of the Proletarian of the hoped-for future,
a clew to the virtues and standards being held up before the
population by its Bolshevik regime, but only vaguely related to
the living men and women behind the machines and the plows.

The recognition of this fact enabled me to solve (or so I
thought) the most disturbing of the paradoxes of Soviet power:
the deification of the Proletariat in the abstract — on posters and
postage stamps, in official theses and official literature — while the
flesh-and-blood working masses were treated most cavalierly. The
communist functionary who worships the Proletariat as a class
and spits on the self-seeking, wretched specimens of the class
whom he handles in everyday life is not necessarily a fraud. On
the contrary, his contempt for Ivan Ivanovich may be a measure
of his respect for the Ivan Ivanovich-to-be. The selfish, stubbornly
unappreciative people whom he must whip into the shape of his
vision seem to him an affront to the idealized Proletarian for
whom he went to tsarist prisons, for whom he fought civil wars.
Workers who achieve power cannot be expected to idealize other
workers as romantic upper-class people do ; they know the creatures
too intimately.

Perhaps there is no contradiction at all in the inspired ruthless-
ness with which men, cherishing the vision of a “New Peasant,”
exterminate the old, earthy, uncouth and self-centered peasants
who now usurp his place. Does this sound fanciful? Turn to the
Webbs, Sidney and Beatrice, and taste their frank abhorrence of
the Russian peasants, with their “characteristic peasant vices of
greed and cunning, varied by outbursts of drunkenness and recur-
rent periods of sloth,” these “stubborn” peasants “formerly servile”
now “becoming rebellious.” (Have the Webbs never heard of
other rebellious Russian peasants, in the days of Bulatov, Stenka

SEARCH FOR THE “REAL RUSSIA” 327

Razin, and Pugachev? ) With that attitude of loathing established
in Volume I, they need not be blood-thirsty to accept complacently
the horrors of forcible collectivization in Volume II. Turn, if you
prefer, to the Hebrew Prophets cursing their people with sadistic
curses because they do not accept the ways of the Lord of Hosts.
It is the divine mission of prophets to despise and castigate the
Chosen People or the Chosen Classes.

VI. Bargains in Ideals and Omelettes

THE Soviet capital was fast becoming a paradise for mediocrities
and misfits from other countries. Anything from the mysterious
and glamorous “abroad” was a magnet to draw Russians, who had
been cut off for nearly a generation from the main currents of the
world’s culture and were famished for warmth and beauty free
of shoddy propaganda. Frequently a first-rate European or Ameri-
can artist came to Moscow, content to perform for worthless
rubles in return for the thrill of seeing the land of the Five Year
Plan. But mostly those who came to show their derelict vaudeville
acts in the Music Hall, to exhibit their sculpture and painting, to
sing or play at the Conservatory Hall, were has-beens or never-
beens, unknown or forgotten in their home lands. They expanded
under the unaccustomed appreciation, and lived pinched lives on
the rubles they earned. They said the proper things to interviewers
in Moscow and to interviewers at home — if they rated press at-
tention — to keep the gates of the U.S.S.R. open, and in time
many of them came to believe the things they said by dint of
repetition.

Contraltos or ’cellists known only to Friends of the Soviet
Union audiences in their own countries made nationwide tours
here. They wrote pieces for the Soviet magazines on the degrada-
tion of bourgeois culture. Painters and sculptors whose art never
went beyond independent shows and arty cafes at home, gushed
about the great progress of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and
saw their work installed in Moscow’s leading museums. Third-
rate writers with aching inferiority complexes promised to shed
their last drop of blood in defense of the U.S.S.R. and received
bundles of torn rubles as an advance on the translations of their
works, which were never published. Skilled mechanics thrown
out of work at home blossomed into engineers here, with the
coveted admission cards to the foreign stores.”

From this time forward the Soviet Union was a colossal de-

328

BARGAINS IN IDEALS AND OMELETTES 329

partment store of ideas and opportunities for the modest price of
a first, second, or third category tour. Thrills and easement of
spirit at bargain prices. Everything from nude bathing to billion-
dollar dams, from free love to concentration camps. A new up-to-
the-minute social faith, fashionable in the nicest circles since the
depression, with one shot in the arm. The most ingratiating floor
walkers from Intourist and Voks and the Foreign Office; com-
missars in person and little intimate receptions in the former
palaces of merchant princes for special customers.

Everyone found what he wanted most, and a sense of superiority
into the bargain. It was easy to feel superior to the rabble who
stood on lines, who were shooed off trains to make way for the
cash customers, who regarded a tweed skirt or a fountain-pen as
a miracle, who were rationed and liquidated and mobilized for
parades. The only place in the world where you could stand at
the apex with dictators and merge ecstatically with the masses
simultaneously: a synthesis of absolute power and absolute humility
heretofore vouchsafed only to rare mystics and martyrs. One could
become not only a proletarian but a proletarian dictator for the
price of a third-category tour.

Hard-boiled capitalists found the spectacle to their taste: no
strikes, no lip, hard work on a bread-and- water diet; and one
good look at a Soviet factory cured them of the fear of Russian
competition. Soft-boiled idealists found familiar slogans, day
nurseries, model prisons, bigger and better uplift. Pale advocates
of juiceless causes — birth control, Esperanto, new calendars, sex
equality, prison reform, big families, futurist dancing, modem edu-
cation — found surcease from contempt. Everyone outside the Soviet
Union who accounted himself enlightened and advanced veered
toward Intourist under the pleasant illusion that Bolshevism was
a new, more gloriously intransigent bohemianism.

The obliging floor-walkers always found something in the de-
partment store to match the crankiest of tastes. I saw Voks sell
the glories of mass production to a couple of California back-to-
nature, hand-loom faddists. Vegetarians fleeing bourgeois stand-
ards swooned in an ecstasy of admiration for Soviet slaughter-
houses equipped with American machinery.

Virginal school teachers and sex-starved wives came close to
the masses, especially the male classes, and some of them were

DOUBT

33 °

so deeply impressed with the potency of Bolshevik ideas that they
extended their visas again and again. A few of them emerged to
write shrill books extolling the Soviet Union’s “new unshackled
attitudes,” the equality of the sexes, abortion clinics. One such
volume — which I described uncharitably as “a horizontal view of
Russia”— saw the glorious new morality chiefly through the eyes of
a stalwart Red Sailor.

British and American ladies with triple chins and overwhelm-
ing bosoms, having tried and discarded other spiritual diversions,
now “found” Bolshevism. One of them was moved to verse in
the best Sunday-school manner:

“Oh! Why are words so poor and weak?

Hopeless to write and hard to speak,

To tell of all that you have done
Since your great Victory was won.

Your children are a happy band,

Knowledge and Freedom hand in hand.

War, Crime, Disease will disappear
For perfect Love can cast out Fear!”

Unappreciative Britishers and Americans residing in Moscow sug-
gested that Perfect Love casting out Fear would make an ideal
slogan for the liquidation of kulaks. It should be inscribed, we
said, over every concentration camp. But the Kremlin never took
up the suggestion.

The antics of these foreigners were an endless source of amuse-
ment to us. Earnest seekers after “the truth at last about Russia,”
new philosophies in sugar-coated pill form, confirmation of their
private phobias, revenge on the world. Job-seekers prepared to
devote their lives to the Soviet Cause at a decent salary and a
“foreign store” ration book. They gamboled merrily among the
queues and liquidations and found oily dialectical salves for their
various frustrations. The humor of eminent foreign economists,
educators, sociologists being flattered and gulled — of simpler folks
g ulling themselves and doing the flattering — was shot through with
pathos.

We saw rapturous visitors, beginning with approval of cigar-
box architecture, conductorless orchestras, the Dalton system, or

BARGAINS IN IDEALS AND OMELETTES 33 I

free abortions, extend it to include approval of Russia’s age-old
methods of policing its meek subjects and Petrine tactics in forc-
ing chunks of Westernism down recalcitrant Asiatic gullets. They
joined the Friends of the Soviet Union and felt themselves bold
iconoclasts participating in the rebirth of the world. When the
Kremlin ultimately outlawed the cigar-box architecture, prohibited
abortions, adopted Baptist codes of morals and Victorian standards
of art, these people must have felt themselves betrayed.

I think back to Jane, a thin, high-strung New York liberal who
quivered visibly at the sight of a new man. In Bolshevism she
found not only a job but escape from the restraints of an unsatis-
factory husband and the supervision of a middle-class family. Sit-
ting on an unmade bed in her hotel room she could talk for hours
about freedom for women under the Red flag. “Starvation, forced
labor, the extermination of the intelligentsia,” she said, “bah! It’s
worth it, it’s worth it, I tell you, because Russia has liquidated sex
bugaboos. Equality of men and women, the single standard. . . .
It’s worth it!”

Or the spinsterish Sarah, a Los Angeles intellectual whose in-
hibitions fell away like a moth-eaten garment as soon as she crossed
the Soviet frontier. Stored-up passion gave her every article in
the Moscow Daily News a peculiarly high-pitched school-girl
quality. Or the Mid- Western professor with the soft, clammy
hands who pinched the rosy cheeks of boy interpreters and gushed
indiscriminately over every Soviet theatrical performance.

The English-language paper founded at this time for the edifica-
tion of the growing American and British population provided a
sanctuary for as bizarre a collection of incompetents and twisted
personalities as was ever gathered under one roof. Michael Borodin
was put in charge of an army of amateur journalists. Once he led
a Chinese revolution $ now he quarreled with office boys — an em-
bittered and broken giant. The paper at first was published as a
“five day weekly,” Moscow News > then it was turned into a
daily. An immense staff turned out a four-page sheet, chiefly
warmed over from yesterday’s Russian-language papers. Every
obscure celebrity from the U.S.A. or England was quoted as a
matter of course by this paper as thrilled by the wonderful progress
that he saw immediately on reaching Moscow and determined

DOUBT

332

to expose the bourgeois lies about food shortage and terror as soon
as he returned home.

Sometimes, on returning home, these people instead confirmed
the lies. The Moscow Daily News thereupon produced a sheaf of
statements and confessions to prove that the ingrate had been
drunk, incompetent, a speculator, and a rapist while in the U.S.S.R.

2

The apex of absurdity, a sort of summation of all this foreign
lunacy, seemed to me the international congress of proletarian and
near-proletarian writers in Kharkov. RAPP, which Stalin himself
two years later kicked into the ash-can and which ranks high
among the acknowledged “mistakes” of this period, was in com-
mand of the gathering, as it was of all cultural life in the coun-
try. Soviet writers were living in a state of terror under the whip
of half-literate dictators of literature like Comrade Auerbach. Men
of genuine talent had committed suicide, or ceased to write, or
manufactured proletarian pot-boilers for which they hated them-
selves. Literary criticism had become a function of the Secret Serv-
ice. That Soviet literature at this time had touched incredible
depths of mediocrity is no longer disputed even by hundred-per-
centers.

Against this background, several score pamphleteers and politi-
cians from a dozen countries gathered to formulate tactics for
spreading the blessings of RAPP to the rest of the world. Each
of them pretended to represent the “advanced sector” of litera-
ture in his own country. They brought “fervent greetings” from
the cultural front of their respective nations. They boasted of the
horrors in their homes — the political prisoners, the suppression of
revolutionary writers, the decaying democracy — like barkers out-
side side-shows. And they pointed with pride to Soviet achieve-
ments on the literary front. The Alice-in-Wonderland innocence
of these men, in even daring to mention here subjects like politi-
cal prisoners and suppression of revolutionary thought! In eulogiz-
ing a literature they could not read and a system whose Jesuitical
intricacies were beyond their simple minds!

The proceedings of the congress read like a much madder Mad

BARGAINS IN IDEALS AND OMELETTES 333

Hatter’s party. I was close enough to the literary inquisition to
savor the epic insanity to the last “Hail Auerbach! Hail Stalin!”
To amplify the spurious importance of the conclave, Dinamov’s
inquisitorial Literary Gazette inflated every foreign delegate into
an “outstanding writer” in his country, citing as proof his stereo-
typed undertaking to defend the U.S.S.R.

The “outstanding writer” from the United States was one Gold,
a slightly hysterical little man in baggy clothes, with inflamed eyes
in a sallow, dissipated-looking face. Gold thought bitterly of
American writers who lived in penthouses and delivered himself
of impassioned “Hails!” He left no doubt at all that an Ameri-
can RAPP was needed and must come quickly to liquidate Hey-
wood Broun, H. L. Mencken, and others who poked fun at Gold ;
to liquidate, particularly, those swinish writers and publishers who
had never even heard of him.

The panegyrics by educators, Professor Dewey and Professor
Counts and a bevy of sub-Deweys and sub-Counts, were of par-
ticular interest to those of us who had the problem of educating
children in Moscow to solve. Most of these theoreticians of peda-
gogy recognized instantly that the Soviet planners had cribbed
some of their favorite ideas, which put them in a highly amenable
frame of mind. On paper the Soviet educational plans and cur-
ricula combined the best features of Dewey, Dalton, Montessori,
et al . A few model schools made a brave and usually futile effort
to live up to the plans, within the limits of the shortages of paper,
pencils, teachers, and hygienic facilities. I do not know what
methods the specialists from abroad used to investigate Soviet
education. Presumably, they stocked up on theoretical official plans
and brochures and had a glimpse of the model schools, just as
famous economists tanked up on blueprints, official statistics, and
naive premises.

Each time I read another hyperbolic report by another well-
meaning modern educator, I hastened hopefully to the schools he
mentioned or inferred. I discovered that somehow he had failed
to look at the toilet 5 missed the fact that the school had been
closed half of the term because of epidemic diseases ; forgotten to
note that one teacher, badly in need of schooling herself, must
•supervise sixty or seventy undernourished and excessively mis-

DOUBT

334

chievous little pupils. The enthusiasm of these educators attested
their kind hearts and modernist daring, but their judgments be-
longed with the effusions of the ever-lengthening line of self-
deluded outsiders.

Fortified with an introduction from the Foreign Office, Billy
went to interview an Assistant Commissar of Education. The need
to put Genie into a school became more insistent; perhaps some-
where in Moscow and its environs there was in fact a school worthy
of the foreign educators’ more sober lines. The Assistant Com-
missar was most affable. He listed the very best of the schools,
the models among the models, and explained the special virtues
of each.

“Go and look at them — well, look at them again,” he said. “I
shall give you a letter. Whichever you decide upon, your child
will be admitted instantly. You have my word on that.”

She thanked him, put away the letter, and departed. Just out-
side the door she felt a detaining hand on her shoulder. It was
the Assistant Commissar. He was slightly embarrassed.

“Mrs. Lyons, I wanted to say Something more,” he said. “In
there I talked to you as an official of the Commissariat. Here I
can talk to you as a father. I have children too. Tell me, is there
any reason why you must keep your daughter in Moscow?”

“Why, no,” Billy said. “It’s simply that we would like to have
her with us.”

“You mean you have the possibility of sending her to study
abroad?”

“Of course. We know some excellent schools in Berlin and
Geneva and — ”

“Then why do you hesitate!” The Assistant Commissar’s tone
was an amalgam of astonishment and envy.

We put Genie into the Berthold Otto Schule, at Lichterfelde,
Berlin. She remained there until Hitler came to power.

“There you are ! Afraid that their kid will be infected with com-
munism in a Soviet school!” Our friend X, whose Soviet or-
thodoxy was his stock-in-trade in a hard world, shook his head
sadly. But just three months behind Genie, the children of Com-
rade X, too, came to Berlin for their schooling and they, too,
remained until Hitler came to power.

BARGAINS IN IDEALS AND OMELETTES 335

3

The big house on the Spirodonovka where the Foreign Office
entertained was an adolescent dream of grandeur come true 5
opulence as envisioned by a provincial storekeeper. Suits of armor,
complete with lances, posed in hollow dignity by the shallow
steps leading from the vestibule to a great foyer paneled in ma-
hogany ; in the background, for no reason at all, a gigantic Chinese
vase covered with the writhings of bronze serpents held the eye.
The gold and ivory ballroom was vaguely Japanese in intention.
Gold fleur-de-lis provided the motif in a medieval French cham-
ber hung with Gobelins 5 a cabinet filled with the original owner’s
porcelain figures remained intact here, even unto a piece of erotica
pointed out to newcomers when the ladies were not looking.

But the crowd converged on the immense, neatly rustic hunting
room, where the long table loaded with food was located. Leaning
against the capacious fireplace, the U.P. and I.N.S. correspondents
agreed ruefully, between mouthfuls of roast duck washed down
with Naperouly, that these “press teas” were not what they used
to be. Constrained and a little awkward.

“The trouble,” said I.N.S., “is that in the old days, two or
three years ago, they used to invite low-down newspapermen who
had nothing to hide. Now we get only big shots, editors and jeuil-
leton writers, and you can’t talk to them about what really in-
terests you. Looks too much like digging for secrets!”

“Sure,” U.P. grouched, “mustn’t ask them questions because
they might know the answers. It’s a silly business anyhow. What’s
the use of meeting them, when they don’t dare come near you be-
tween parties?”

From the corner of an eye, they watched the New York Times
in lively conference with Karl Radek and wondered whether he
was getting some valuable inside dope on the forthcoming Party
Congress. Radek’s face, framed in a fringe of straggly brown hair
sailor fashion, seemed out of focus, as though seen in a crooked
mirror 5 his smile uncovered decayed teeth and implied that he
knew something nobody else even suspected.

Arens,* who had succeeded Rothstein as head of the Press De-

* Later Soviet Consul-General in New York.

DOUBT

336

partment, was concentrating on a bearded and spatted gentle-
man from England. The fresh arrival always gets most atten-
tion, U.P. thought; late bird gets the worm, the matter phrased
itself in his mind. Arens was more shifty than his predecessor, but
more energetic; there was a distinct aura of secret service about
his personality and many rumors afloat to confirm it.

“We don’t hide our difficulties and mistakes/’ Arens smiled,
and the Englishman smiled back. When the censor’s throaty voice
emerged again it was pooh-poohing the censorship : “Our function
is merely to help the correspondents, to prevent them from mak-
ing mistakes. No trouble sending facts and figures, but we must
draw the line on lies and exaggerations.” The Englishman nodded
his beard; he understood.

I.N.S. nudged U.P. and indicated with his head toward the
farther corner, where censor Podolsky was signing a dispatch for
A.P. Now that was really disquieting. Lucky dog, getting all the
Tass stuff exclusively. A.P. sauntered by, shying away from the
accusing eyes of his competitors.

“Something hot?” I.N.S. called after him.

“Oh, no, just routine,” A.P. said, with a wink.

They didn’t like his manner; cat that ate the canary. Their
evening was definitely spoiled. What if it were a really important
story — somebody dead, or something with an American angle?
Separately they cornered the censors and tried to pry a hint out
of their bored smiles. Well, maybe there would be a communique
tonight, Arens admitted. Small consolation that, with A.P. al-
ready filed and finished.

U.P. was joined by the sole Austrian correspondent, who whis-
pered that he had something interesting to confide. The Austrian
liked to catch the Soviet statisticians in lies, and, though scared
to death of expulsion, could not resist the temptation of reporting
it. He was always on the verge of being thrown out of Russia
but managed to retract the offending article in the nick of time.*

Meanwhile, I.N.S. approached the German contingent. Their
embassy was well informed; one might pick up a scrap of news.
At the moment, however, they were only rehashing the old scan-
dal of Paul Scheffer’s expulsion. For many years the Berliner

* Finally it happened — Nicholas Basseches, of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse t
was expelled in June, 1937.

BARGAINS IN IDEALS AND OMELETTES 337

Tageblatt correspondent had been Moscow’s favorite: a man who
could take the “long view.” But with the advent of the Stalin
era his view had become much too long and the last time he was
out for a vacation he was refused a re-entry visit.

“Your American colleague!” Lokal Anzeiger twitted I.N.S.
“In all the years Herr Scheffer was here he swore by him — now
that he’s been kicked out, he swears at him.”

A group of Soviet novelists, invited to give the party tone and
body, was devoting itself industriously to the carafes of vodka
and brandy. They enjoyed the eats and drinks, but were aware
of the insult implied in the invitation ; honest-to-God proletarian
novelists and poets were not invited for these impious contacts
with infidels.

In the French room, Anna Louise Strong and Maurice Hindus
were comparing notes on their most recent visits to kolkhozes .
Hindus, as usual, had dug deep into the muds of his native
village. A batch of relative newcomers was listening in, tingling
with the virtuous consciousness of gathering first-hand impressions
from experts. One of them was making notes unashamedly. “Do
you mind repeating that?” he said every now and then. They
didn’t mind. “Yes,” the note-maker murmured, underlining
venomously, “I suspected the talk about terror in the villages was
a lie; what a comfort to know that it’s a lie.”

There was something beautifully big-hearted about the way
experts were willing to forgive and forget the “occasional ex-
cesses by hot-heads” before Stalin’s “dizziness” article. They nursed
no petty grudges.

By common impulse everybody suddenly began to depart, like
children released from classroom. The faces of I.N.S. and U.P.
were furrowed with worry. They had failed to find the trail of
the A.P. story.

4

At eleven that night, the Foreign Office summoned them. Ac-
companied by interpreters and carrying portable typewriters, cor-
respondents gathered in the narrow ante-chambers of the cen-
sors’ offices, and after half an hour’s waiting received smudged
mimeographed sheets. It turned out to be only a speech by Mikhail

DOUBT

338

Tomsky, the former head of the trade unions, delivered last
week in Tiflis in praise of the “monolithic Party” under the genius
of Stalin’s leadership.

U.P. and I.N.S. were disgusted. Seven hours of waiting and
worry — for that! The story had its points, if one were permitted
to write a long “think piece” about it. The speech meant that
Tomsky, a Right Oppositionist, was giving up the fight, recog-
nizing Stalin’s overlordship. It meant that the forthcoming Con-
gress, the first since the one in 1927 which expelled Trotsky,
Zinoviev, Kamenev, and their followers, would be a cut-and-
dried affair. But who in America understood or cared? The para-
graph of news that might be pressed out of it had already been
pre-empted by A.P.

Nevertheless U.P. typed wearily:

tomsky oppositionist leader again recanted political errors speech tiflis
yesterweek publicked today wellinformeds consider significant marking
collapse antistalin opposition reliquidation kulaks tomsky said quote
monolithic party under leadership genius stalin best disciple lenin always
right stop right opposition left deviationists tools kulaks kulak agents
unquote

He glanced toward New York Times. “No quota,” he thought
enviously, “always writing reams of stuff. How can one compete
with that? I suppose he’s doing another editorial on collectiviza-
tion,”

As a matter of fact New York Times at this moment was on his
second page:

. . . And so again Stalin is getting away with it, because when all
is said and done he represents the ruthless Asiatic spirit so suitable to
this backward population accustomed to Asiatic autocracy stop as your
correspondent clearly foresaw and reported fortnight ago right oppo-
sition is knuckling under which cinches scheduled communist congress
for stalin stop mind you your correspondent holds no brief for shall we
say unusual methods used to liquidate betteroff peasant but like stalin
he recognizes this is war dash class war stop your correspondent has
been convinced by ten years intimate study of soviet situation that you
cant make omelettes without breaking eggs.

The egg-and-omelette theory, dashed off nonchalantly one mid-
night, was destined to achieve a sort of immortality. It told ex-

BARGAINS IN IDEALS AND OMELETTES 339

actly nothing about Russia, since eggs were being smashed for
omelettes in a lot of other countries. But it told a lot, apparently,
about a type of reporting. At any rate, whenever anyone thereafter
wished to imply a tongue-in-cheek reporter playing the game of
those in power, he referred to the immortal omelette. Sinclair
Lewis in It Can y t Haffen Here has a complacent foreign corre-
spondent who takes the long view on an egg-and-omelette basis.
Malcolm Muggeridge, a vitriolic English journalist, wrote a book
called Winter in Moscow in which he pinned down a lot of
Soviet specimens with cruel accuracy. The egg-and-omelette line
was the identifying tag on the correspondent whom he called
Jefferson.

His puny dispatch signed and sealed, U.P. carried it to the
Telegraph Building, a good mile’s walk. I.N.S. and a few others
had gotten there first — every minute counts — and their messages
lay neatly piled up. The U.P. dispatch, being the last to arrive,
was on top of the pile and would therefore be cabled first when
the clerks got around to it.

He went to sleep in a sour mood. In his dreams he saw a huge
bowl; Arens and Stalin and the bearded Englishman in spats
shoveling In kulaks, Tomskys, foreign reporters; all of them work-
ing on power from Dnieprostroi ; great yellow omelettes, each
signed and sealed by the censors, were coming off a belt and a
lot of Americans with the New York Times tucked under their
chins were eating greedily.

An insistent bell roused him out of his sleep. It was a messenger
with a cable from London: “asspress reports tomsky surren-
dered how.” By this time London had his dispatch — no need
answering. Damn Tass! And damn the telegraph service here!
He worked off a little of his temper in a sarcastic note to the
Commissariat of Posts and Telegraphs. “It takes ten minutes,” he
wrote in part, “for a cable to reach from London to Moscow,
and then ten hours for it to travel the two blocks from the Tele-
graph Building to Petrovsky Pereulok. Now I ask you, comrades,
is that the way to overtake and outdistance capitalism?” He had
written such notes before.

Several weeks later, a letter came from the Commissariat of
Posts and Telegraphs:

DOUBT

340

Citizen: Your complaint has been investigated by a Special Volun-
tary Brigade for the Investigation of Complaints and the messenger
responsible for the delay of your message number 7846-a has been rep-
rimanded and removed from his post.

U.P. sighed and reproached himself. Now I, too, he thought,
have broken an egg for the Times omelette. The cables, of course,
continued to be delivered from ten to twenty hours late.

VII. Revolt Against Intelligence

PEOPLE under dictatorships, it has been well said, are con-
demned to a lifetime of enthusiasm. It is a wearing sentence.
Gladly they would burrow into the heart of their misery and lick
their wounds in private. But they dare not 5 sulking is next-door
to treason. Like soldiers weary unto death after a long march, they
must line up smartly for parade.

Obediently, Moscow’s working population turned out once again
in mass demonstration, a million strong, converging upon the Big
Theater from factories and offices throughout the city. The occa-
sion was the opening of the Sixteenth Congress of the Communist
Party, in the summer of 1930. The demonstration was not for the
Congress but for the demonstrators. It was a disciplinary ritual.
Workers who trudged five or ten miles under the weight of a ban-
ner must be deeply impressed with the might and significance of
the gathering in whose name it was ordered.

In the months preceding the Congress, foreign reporters had
inflated its importance in order to create news. We blew our own
speculations into the empty bladder of another commandeered
meeting of meek bureaucrats until it bellied with synthetic sig-
nificance. Formally this was the highest organ of authority in the
ruling Party and all previous meetings had been tense with
genuine controversy. Here Lenin had frequently fought for his
policies 5 here Trotsky had gone down fighting furiously at the
last gathering three years ago. Would Stalin’s audacious course in
agriculture and in industry be criticized? Would the grousing
leaders of the Right — Rykov, Tomsky, Bukharin,* Uglanov,*
Lenin’s widow — lash out at last as Trotsky had lashed out at
the 1927 Congress?

Earnest discussion of such questions made “copy” in a dull sea-
son. With the mien of sideshow fortune-tellers, we read the politi-

* Imprisoned in 1937.

341

DOUBT

34 2

cal horoscope and prophesied victory for Stalin. It was a safe
prophecy. Even the possibility of criticism directed against him was
by this time unthinkable. In the past, there had been real discussion
in communist cells before a Congress 5 now there was only des-
perate competition in panegyrics for Stalin and his appointed lieu-
tenants, congealed in boring resolutions of fealty. A wayward
thought, though whispered in private, reached the sharp ears of
the police and meant expulsion from membership or worse. The
G.P.U. had become custodian of the Party’s mind and conscience.

And the Congress unwound according to schedule: fighting
unity, forged in the white heat of honest controversy, had been
replaced by petrified unanimity. On the opening day, the stolid
Ca ucasi an visage of Stalin covered almost the entire front page of
Pravda , with a tiny insert of Lenin in the corner to attest the
direct succession. Monotonous praise rattled in the editorial col-
umns, on the radio, in machine-made resolutions; no one ven-
tured to deviate from the set phraseology of self-abasement, the
orthodox litany of “Hail Stalins” prescribed for the faithful. Dele-
gations from factories, institutions, army sectors, foreign com-
munist organizations, passed one after the other across the flood-
lit stage of the opera-house, stammered their greetings and dis-
appeared.

Stalin spoke for seven hours, a record even in Russia. The speech
was published in full and we studied it painstakingly for pegs on
which to hang dispatches. Whatever I may have thought about
the cumulative cruelties of his regime, I could not but feel an
awed respect for the sharp, single-minded, unfeeling certainty
of this man’s attitude. Nowhere in it was there so much as a
tremor of fellow-feeling for the millions uprooted and dispersed,
for the battalions in forced labor camps, for a population stagger-
ing under burdens and weakened by deprivations. Not even glow-
ing hatreds. Stalin was a calm engineer building a new world
within the frame of the old, diverting great rivers of national his-
tory, blasting out millionfold classes, bridging centuries of back-
wardness, leveling mountains of opposition. Listening to his for-
mulas and statistics, I had the sense that he was working with
earth, stone, and water rather than flesh and blood; describing the
tensile strengths of steel, the resistance of granite rather than the
tensions of human hearts and the stubbornness of human minds.

REVOLT AGAINST INTELLIGENCE 343

Nothing his enemies can say of Stalin — -not even the toadying of
his petty worshippers — can detract from the essential greatness of
the man. He belongs in the succession of monstrous genius with
Caesar and Hernando Cortes, Peter the Great and Napoleon, the
genius that is too often an affliction upon mankind.

The shattered lives implicit in his statistics were so much debris
which, like a good engineer, he was using to fill swamps and fortify
weak spots in the structure. Stalin felt no need to explain or
apologize. The expansion of the lumber industry in the Northern
forests, the emergence of new industries in waste-lands based on
kulak and other involuntary labor, were justification enough. When
he finished his seven-hour report, nothing remained for the rest
to do, except shout “Amen!”

Only when he paused to attack the weak-kneed humanists and
deviators, the creatures tangled in mortal hesitancies and squeam-
ishness, did Stalin break through his calm. But he would not pay
them the compliment of flaming anger, covering them instead with
derision and humiliation. He reduced all their principles and de-
cencies to the muddy level of cowardice. He jeered at them:

Should the slightest hardship appear, they are already worried that
something may happen. Let a cockroach stir somewhere, even before
it has managed to crawl out of its hole, and already they rush back,
become frightened and begin to yell about a catastrophe, about the
destruction of the Soviet power. (General laughter.) We quiet them
and try to convince them that there is nothing menacing, that it is only
a cockroach, which they need not fear. But nothing doing! They yell
their “Who says cockroach? It is not a cockroach but a thousand wild
animals. It is not a cockroach but destruction of the Soviets.”

The Congress rocked with laughter. The waves of hilarity
washed Rykov and Tomsky onto the rostrum. (Bukharin was
saved from appearing by a merciful illness.) Rykov, short, stocky,
with the smoldering eyes and ascetic face of a fanatic, had suc-
ceeded Lenin as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars.
All his life he had fought for the Bolshevik cause, but never
before had he been called a coward scared by cockroaches. For
a moment, perhaps, he considered the need to strike back, to die
defending himself. Then he looked into the sea of taunting faces,
felt the sting of the laughter, and gave up. Meekly, he recited

DOUBT

344

his rehearsed speech of contrition. He was not an enemy of the
revolution, he pleaded weakly, but had allowed himself blindly
to become the mouthpiece and instrument of enemies. The audi-
ence jeered; not enough! The penitence did not ring true! The
old warrior lifted his shaggy head for once with a defiant gesture.

“It is not an easy thing,” he threw at them, “to make a speech
such as I am making!”

Then his defiance fizzled. He gave the delegates a full measure
of his humiliation.

He was followed by Mikhail Tomsky, whose principal fault
was that he had sought to make the trade unions a genuine bulwark
against impersonal exploitation by the state; he was a small,
hunched man, intense, the type almost of the underground revo-
lutionary. He, too, went through the gestures of recantation.

Their only consolation was that no one in his senses believed
their penitence. Like the demonstration and the resolutions and
the laughter, it was a ritual prescribed by the priesthood: a sacra-
ment of public confession.

A high point in the proceedings was provided by the arrival and
presentation of a shiny new tractor, the gift of the recently com-
pleted Stalingrad Tractor Plant. It was described as “the first
tractor to come off the belt.” Everyone knew that the belt was
not yet moving, would not move for weeks, and that this gift
had been carefully hand-tooled under American technical super-
vision. But that, too, did not matter — another act in the ceremonial.
A cockroach as symbol of the opposition, a tractor as symbol of
Stalin.

2

Rykov for the time being was allowed to remain in the Politburo.
Tomsky and Bukharin were removed. Three new members were
designated: Kaganovich, Kirov,* and Kossior. The Politburo was
further' purged of its Leninist heritage. Tough-skinned, ruthless
drill-sergeants from the ranks of the proletariat had displaced the
argumentative intellectuals.

It was no accident that all three of the new members were
self-taught, men who had never been abroad or tasted Western
civilization. Even Lazar Kaganovich, now the only Jew in the

* Assassinated in 1934.

REVOLT AGAINST INTELLIGENCE 345

Politburo, the only orator in the uppermost circle o£ leaders and
the only one with a genuine flair for theoretical polemics, despised
intellectuals. Unlike Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Radek, Lit-
vinov, and other Jews among revolutionary leaders, he knew noth-
ing of the emigre revolutionist’s romantic career, and had never
received a formal education. He had risen from the dregs of the
poverty-stricken Jewish community in Gomel, fashioned his hatreds
into a stout ladder for his ambitions, and now stood firmly planted
at the right hand of Stalin. Kossior and Kirov were blunt, hard-
working, disciplined officers in a machine of power, lesser Stalins
in their respective principalities: Kossior in the Ukraine, Kirov
in the Leningrad area. They cared nothing for speech-making and
nothing for argument. Their strength lay in obedient action, de-
crees, midnight arrests.

To understand the new Russia, Stalin’s Russia, one must gauge
the immense differences between the Politburo headed by Lenin
and the one into which Kaganovich, Kossior and Kirov were in-
ducted. Only Stalin and Kalinin remained as links between the
General Staffs of 1920 and 1930: the two men who had seemed
most out of place in the scintillating company around Lenin.
Kalinin’s was a peasant shrewdness that had nothing in common
with the intellectuality of a Zinoviev or a Lunacharsky. Stalin’s
taciturn, patient efficiency had nothing in common with the bril-
liant inspirations of a Trotsky or Lenin.

By education, experience, and interests the group around Lenin
had been cosmopolitan and internationalist; it was brilliant and
cultured, at home in Europe and European languages; and it was
middle-class in its origins. Stalin’s Politburo, though it contained
two Georgians, a Lett, and a Jew, was earthy, Russian through
and through, aware of the West only as something hostile and
treacherous. Only one of its members (Molotov, who soon took
Rykov’s place) was not clearly proletarian by birth and upbring-
ing.

Whatever hopes and slogans of internationalism it may have
inherited, the Stalin regime was profoundly nationalistic. The in-
ternationalism to which it aspired was a world state under Rus-
sian dominion, which is something totally different from the
super-nation which Lenin and Trotsky envisioned. Stalin’s world
would always have the Moscow Kremlin as its center, even as

DOUBT

346

Paris was Napoleon’s center; but Lenin’s might just as easily
have been London or Shanghai.

I do not mean that Stalin’s regime was as yet consciously na-
tionalistic, as Mussolini’s or Pilsudski’s were. It was utterly Rus-
sian, rather, in the very fiber of its psychological make-up, its
thinking, and its acting, its natural renunciation of the standards
and prejudices of Europe.- Stalin’s was the Russia under the thin
veneer of Westernism deposited by the centuries since Peter first
brought in Dutchmen to build ships for him. It was, indeed, most
Russian where it pretended to be European and American, in
the ada ptation of socialism imported from Germany and France,
in the adaptation of industrialism imported from England and
America.

3

Vladimir Khenkin, a popular comic actor, had a sure-fire “gag.”
It meant nothing to the uninitiated, but it convulsed Russian audi-
ences with laughter. There were those in the audiences who winced
and only pretended to laugh.

“One night,” he said with a straight face, in the course of his
famous monologue, “I heard a vigorous knock at my door. So I
took my little suitcase and went to ofen the door”

He paused for the guffaws and they always came. The reference
was to the simple fact (incredible to anyone outside of Russia) that
professional men, engineers, technicians, and other pre-revolu-
tionary intellectuals usually had a few things packed in readiness
for the emergency of a sudden arrest. Any night “the wagon”
might arrive, and it was the part of foresight to have an extra
change of underwear, a little dried bread, a few other things that
might lighten the burden of imprisonment, always on hand. The
possession of such a suitcase was certainly not a token of. guilty
conscience, except the guilt of being alive, prematurely literate,
and belonging to the wrong category of human beings.

Most of the educated classes were guilty, indeed, of a deep and
incurable crime, namely, skepticism. For the most part, they re-
garded the Kremlin’s efforts as fantastic, its “tempos” of industri-
alization foolhardy and doomed to failure, the human cost of the
whole enterprise barbarous. The vague charge of “sabotage” under
which so many thousands of them were rounded up, tortured,

REVOLT AGAINST INTELLIGENCE 347

exiled, and executed amounted, when sifted down to essentials, to
just that ingrained doubt complicated by discontent over physical
privations and mental reservations.

One need not be guilty of an overt act to have his house
searched, himself stuck away in a foul cell, his family terrorized.
An anonymous denunciation by someone who coveted his room or
his job might do it, or the fact that he had been seen playing
chess with someone else who was denounced. Perhaps his name
was listed in the address book of a suspected person, or a second
cousin by marriage, in the course of interrogation, had mentioned
the relationship. Worst of all, the German machines he had helped
buy or install, after being manhandled by peasants accustomed
only to managing wooden plows, had broken down mysteriously.

Those who remember the war-time atmosphere, in which every-
one detected spies in his neighbors and the intelligence divisions
in all countries were deluged with denunciations, can appreciate
the ordeal of the technical and managerial forces in the Russia
of the Piatiletka. The engineer or administrator was the obvious
scapegoat for promises that could not be kept, for plans that went
askew. He was punished for “underestimating (or overestimating)
the possibilities” of his particular enterprise, for risking (or shirk-
ing) a crucial technical decision.

The G.P.U. agent, reckoning his usefulness by the number of
“confessions” he extracted, was hardly fitted to trace the tenuous
borderline where inefficiency or sheer carelessness ended and sabo-
tage began. The arrested intellectual himself was no longer able
to locate that border-line after being held incommunicado for
months, aware that his relatives were in danger, confronted with
“confessions” by colleagues implicating him, and conscious also of
his deeper inner disapproval of the Bolshevik ideology. One can
understand how men signed “confessions” filled with impossible
detail. The hysteria sucked accusers and accused alike into the

maelstrom of its lunacy. .

I knew dozens of men and women who lived m a state or
chronic terror, their little suitcases always packed, though they
worked diligently and avoided even facial expressions which might
cast doubt on their loyalty. To awaken in their own beds in the
morning was a daily miracle for such people. The sound of a door-
bell at an unusual hour left them limp and trembling.

348 DOUBT

The roster of scientists, historians, Academicians, famous engi-
neers, technical administrators, statisticians arrested at this time
reads like an encyclopaedia of contemporary Russian culture. Many
of them were held for months, for years, without so much as
discovering the mysterious crimes charged against them. In addi-
tion to almost unlimited raw labor, the GJP.U. now had an un-
limited supply of technical brains at its disposal.

The revolt against intelligence, signalized in the new personnel
of the Politburo, held true in the whole life of the U.S.S.R. Dis-
trust of the educated man or woman was magnified endlessly by
the disappointments, the despairs, the bitterness of a hundred and
sixty million individuals.

VIII. Forty-eight Ghosts

IN SEPTEMBER the government, through Intourist, took
thirty-odd foreign journalists on a grand swing of European
Russia: by train to Nijni-Novgorod, down the Volga by boat as
far as Stalingrad, then on land again through the Rostov area,
the Caucasus and Crimea 3 or rather, this being the Soviet Union
in the throes of socialization, a tour of factories, construction sites,
state farms, sanatoria, and other social-economic scenery disposed
on that route.

It was an investment in international good will. Rivers of favor-
able publicity for Russia as a tourist paradise were to flow from
this journey. That summer’s tourist flood, the largest as yet in
Soviet history, had left a considerable sediment of glittering valuta
— the possibilities of cashing in on world- wide curiosity suddenly
bulked large in the Soviet imagination.

An Intourist official of important rank, a Comrade Kutuzov,
was in command of the expedition. Subsequently, he went the way
of most Intourist f unctionaries : to prison and exile. A job with that
organization, if not a certain, was by all odds the swiftest road to
counterrevolutionary perdition. Since it involved daily contact
with foreigners, European clothes and ideas, foreign currency, In-
tourist bristled with temptations and crawled with bourgeois con-
tagions — only the purest of heart and most adroit of mind sur-
vived that test. But that was in the darkling future 5 for the present
Comrade Kutuzov and his pretty blonde wife were in charge and
enjoying the responsibility. We had our very own commissary
chief, a charming Georgian whose long name was boiled down to
“Gogo”; he not merely fed us in the weeks of this tour but stuffed
us unmercifully.

Besides resident correspondents, our company counted a most
cosmopolitan assortment of writers come especially for this trip.
The Italians, being a melodramatic folk, came dressed like moun-
tain climbers and laden with cameras, binoculars, first-aid kits, and

349

DOUBT

350

other paraphernalia — just fascist distrust of dictatorships, I sup-
pose. The most earnest member of our party was an undersized
and taciturn Frenchman who was forever taking notes; once I
found him gazing at the scenery and jotting things down, appar-
ently interviewing the clouds. Germany’s contribution was a blond,
lusty, good-looking fellow who did more than Intourist to make
the junket memorable for the ladies in our company.

As always, the American delegation was largest. A red-headed
and bellicose young man. Bob Allen, short and compact, brightened
the journey for us; Bob was still with the Christian Science Moni-
tor, which was to fire him next year for his share in a most un-
mannerly book called Washington Merry-Go-Round. Albert Rhys
Williams was along; one of the small band of Americans which
witnessed the Bolshevik revolution and championed it ardently in
its first romantic years, he now sought, with a determined and
melancholy mien, for traces of the dream and blew conscientiously
upon the embers of his ardor. And Charles Malamuth, a large,
near-sighted young man with a gaudy taste in socks and shirts to
balance his academic mind and training.

Charlie had been a thorn in the side of the Slavic Department
of the University of California because of his outspoken Soviet
sympathies, and now, after a month or so on Soviet soil, was in
a panic of bewilderment as his communist preconceptions fell to
pieces in the harsh contact with reality. He was a good deal like
a man who has hoarded a fortune in banknotes, defended it with
his life, and suddenly learns that the banknotes are mostly counter-
feit.

Despite a few congenital skeptics and disillusioned communists,
however, the tour seemed a sensible publicity investment for In-
tourist. The majority of the journalists were seeing the interior of
Russia for the first time. Their notebooks soon brimmed with fine
statistics. The Russians in the party were decent likeable people,
whose warm hospitality should be repaid in the coin of enthu-
siastic travel stories.

That the investment in the end went wrong, that the propa-
ganda purposes of the whole tour were knocked into a cocked hat,
was no fault of Comrade Kutuzov or “Gogo” or Intourist. Larger
forces were at work, unaware of the thirty-odd junketeers making
notes on the Volga and interviewing the clouds, but destined to

FORTY-EIGHT GHOSTS 35 1

wrench their tour out of its nicely-greased groove and scatter the
statistics like so much chaff in the wind.

2

Nijni-Novgorod, older than Moscow and once more coveted.,
seemed to have slumped to a drab provincial city of ragged crowds,
muddy streets, crumbling houses and impoverished or boarded-up
shop windows. We stood on the city's Kremlin hill, looking down
on a panorama spread below us like a relief map. In the fore-
ground the Kremlin wall underscored with zigzag strokes a por-
tion of the crowded lower city. From the huddled rooftops rose
a cluster of pear-shaped blue domes ; a ribbon of roadway showed
here and there: all of it like the engravings one runs across in old
Russian books. Beyond that, a flat country, with the Volga (at this
point just a timid stream) winding through it, and branching from
the Volga, the river Oka. Leaden clouds pressed down on the dis-
tant horizons.

The young communist newspaperman who volunteered to show
me his city saw neither the fifteenth century engravings nor the
flatness beyond. For him it was only the physical foundation for
the city-to-be. He knew by rote the budget figures for industrial
projects under way which must make Nijni-Novgorod, he assured
me, a great metropolis — the prosperous northern terminal of the
13,000-kilometer Volga.

In the center of the ancient Kremlin, a new House of Soviets
was going up : an angular, barrack-like structure, more like a ware-
house than a municipal palace. It seemed a blasphemy upon the
time-soaked Kremlin walls and I hinted as much to my enthu-
siastic guide.

“We are tired of picturesque backwardness,” he said without
smiling. “We want comfortable standardized prosperity, just like
you Americans have. Over there, where the Oka and the Volga
meet, we shall have our Russian Detroit.”

The Karl Liebknecht , which started its career on the Volga as
the King Albert y was a broad-beamed comfortable ship. As it slid
smoothly down the glassy surface of the river, from Kazan toward
Samara, we listened to a concert recruited from the local popula-

DOUBT

352

tions for our entertainment. More convincingly than any map or
statistical chart, that concert epitomized for us the astonishing
diversity of races settled in this region, and the persistence with
which they cling to their racial intonations.

Nearly four centuries have elapsed since Ivan the Terrible con-
quered the heart of Tartary, yet the music we heard from the
lips of a lovely young singer from the Kazan opera-house had
not a suggestion of Russian in it. The same was true of the other
folk music. A dark-haired Bashkir boy, with such old, old eyes,
blew through a home-made reed instrument mournful tunes which
had more in them of Mongolia than anything this side of the
Urals. A Chuvash girl sang shrill songs careering through two full
octaves, with something in them of the cries of untamed desert
animals. Then a Tartar peasant accompanied himself on an accor-
dion in songs which reminded us how recent after all is the release
of these people from chattel slavery; it helped one comprehend
the fierce opposition to giving up their new-found dignity as pri-
vate owners of a strip of land, no matter how narrow and barren.

In this region we felt how un-Russian is much of Russia. Kazan
is the capital of Red Tartary, the Tartar Soviet Socialist Republic,
checkered with the autonomous territories of other racial groups.
An area about as large as Germany, which in Russia is only a
crumb of land, contains half a dozen racial areas, sundered not
alone from the Russians but from one another: Tartars, Chu-
vashes, Cheremissians, Votiaks, etc. Broaden the limits somewhat
and they take in the Volga Germans around Samara, the dispersed
Mordvians, the Kalmuks near the mouth of the Volga, as well as
colonies of Jews, Ukrainians, the first outposts of the Central
Asiatic peoples.

A representative of the Kazan University, Professor Nossa-Baer
Verslin, talked to us of the past and particularly the projected
glories of Red Tartary. His university numbers among its alumni
Lenin, Lenin’s brother Alexander, Rykov, Count Leo Tolstoy,
and is proud of its traditions. That pride was in Professor Version’s
voice as he boasted of what “we Tartars” have done and what
W we Tartars” planned to do. Through a window, while he un-
folded his vision of an industrialized Tartary, I watched a batch
of men straining against the ropes which harnessed them to a
heavily-laden barge. They threw their weight forward until they

FORTY-EIGHT GHOSTS 353

were nearly level with the mud, tugging, tugging, like overworked
mules. These were the men who inspired the Volga Boatman’s
Song made famous throughout the world by Chaliapin 5 but they
were not singing, only tugging, straining. . . . This glimpse of
the present injected a curiously dramatic counterpoint into the
professor’s recital of the mechanized future.

When Professor Verslin concluded, Charlie Malamuth and I
cornered him for a private question. The Hebraic Nossa-Baer of
his name coupled with the emphasis on “we Tartars” had intrigued
our interest.

“What sort of a Tartar are you?” we asked him.

“I?” he laughed, “why, I am a Tartar from Dvinsk, in the
former Jewish pale.”

Jews were formerly barred from Kazan University 5 now its
official representative was a Jew.

In the office of the Stalingrad Construction Trust, a mild-man-
nered, bespectacled young man named Midson S. Khvesin told
us in the most matter-of-fact fashion that he was directing the
investment of some 900 million rubles to build up the city and
its environs. In the capitalist world he would be classed as a cap-
tain of industry. Khvesin was a barber by profession, he told us
when we pressed him for personal information. In the civil wars,
he had won the Order of the Red Flag which he wore on his
semi-military olive-drab jacket, and now he was in the front
trenches of the industrial battle— it was as simple as that.

“But the civil war,” he smiled, “was easy compared to what we
are up against now. All we had to do then was to fight and die.”

The drea m which was framed in blueprints and architectural
sketches on his office walls and which he explained so patiently
seemed the more startling when we were back on the rutted weary
streets, so hot and dusty and torpid, amidst decayed houses; then
out in the barren, uninviting suburbs, where everything looked
and smelled stagnant. Eighteen kilometers out, at the famous
tractor plant built under Jack Calder’s direction, the dream seemed
less impossible. There was, indeed, a piece of Detroit, like some
monstrous accident, strayed to the frontiers of Asia.

From the large contingent of American engineers and tech-
nicians still at work in this plant we heard the usual tales of in-

354 DOUBT

sufficient food, over-crowded housing, and Russian ineptness with
machinery. But for all the difficulties, the plant was getting into
stride and the workers, though fresh from the farms, were learn-
ing their jobs. Most of these were young people, mere boys and
girls ; they seemed to us alert, good-humored, and curiously con-
scious of their role as industrial pioneers.

National fame had come to a clapboard wayside railroad station,
oddly named Verblyud— Russian for camel— to which we traveled
from Stalingrad. It was the center of an immense state farm ( sov-
khoz ] ), or government “bread factory,” as the communists liked
to call it.

There were no humps on this Camel. Its nearly 300,000 flat
acres rolled to the horizons all around and the impatient eye de-
tected mirages on the edges of this monotonous disk. Its directors
used airplanes to get around the place. But one of the seeming
mirages revealed itself as an administrative center; a collection of
two- and three-story houses, set in correct rows like an American
real estate development. Though not the largest of the “bread
factories”— the neighboring “Gigant” was more than twice as large
—the Camel had become the showplace of Soviet agriculture,
trudged over by an endless stream of native and foreign tourists.

The chief reason for this was the energetic, thirty-five-year-old
Comrade L. S. Margolin, slight in build, his thin features lit up
by a boyish smile that was almost shy. Comrade Margolin an-
swered our eager questions about yield per acre, wages, living con-
ditions.

Around the bend of a fine new road came a cart drawn by oxen,
a family of peasants lounging on dirty straw. They stared open-
mouthed at the strange array of monsters on the field: the tractors,
drillers, combines which had arrived to disturb their thousand-
year-old sleep.

We arrived at Rostov, capital of North Caucasus, in the haze
of evening when outlines are charitably blurred. Viewed from the
balcony of Grand Hotel, the main street might have been in
some well-kept German city rather than the heart of the Don
district. But the unkind light of the next day ripped the veil from
the face of Rostov to show the pockmarks of poverty. Reputed

FORTY-EIGHT GHOSTS

355

to have been among the finest cities in the Russian empire, it was
now tragically out of repair, its windows dusty and neglected,
house fronts crumbling, a sadly derelict look about the crowds
and the queues.

That morning we walked many weary miles over the grounds
of the newly-built “Selmashstroi,’’ probably the world’s largest
plant making farm implements. And in the afternoon we sat
around a red-draped conference table with the Presidium of the
Central Executive Committee of Northern Caucasus: sharp-edged,
determined men, with heaps of official papers in front of them.
Concisely, without beating around the bush, they replied to ques-
tions, countering every reference to immediate shortages and
hardship with a citation of accomplishments and plans. Their busi-
nesslike certainties left no room for sentiment or doubt. They
were a military general staff engaged in a major maneuver and
had already discounted the cost in men.

Towards twilight, Albert Rhys Williams, Bob Allen, and I
were strolling through side-streets, and suddenly the chiming of
church bells came through the haze 3 the first church bells that
I had heard for a year. We followed the sound to the beautiful
Rostov Cathedral whose great thistle-like blue domes dominate
Rostov’s skyline. This happened to be a holy day dear to the
Orthodox believers, the Elevation of the Cross, celebrated by one
of the most impressive of the Orthodox services. The gold and
purple vestments, the full-voiced choir, thousands of lighted
tapers, the long-haired priests moving majestically amidst the
sacred trappings, some three thousand men, women, and children
crowding the cathedral to its doors — an extraordinary contrast it
was to Selmashstroi and the embattled Presidium, remnants of
an old world surviving, pretending to be still alive, within the new.

Even the faces of the worshippers seemed different from those
we had seen in factories, offices, on the state farm. They were
amazingly like characters out of old plays on the stage of the Mos-
cow Art Theater, or out of those paintings of pre-war life one sees
in the museums. In the vestibule, we observed a line of old monks,
white-haired, patriarchal figures all of them, their black cowls
ragged and their faces touched with pain. They held wicker baskets
into which worshippers placed eggs, pieces of bread, other gifts.

DOUBT

356

On inquiring, we were told that these monks had just been dis-
possessed from their monastery and had been allowed to live in
the cathedral, subsisting on charity.

Rhys Williams was deeply touched by their plight. His earnest
face furrowed with sorrow and he stooped a little more than
usual, as though feeling the yoke of these ancient men’s fate.
I recalled that he had once been a minister. Inside, the entry of
the foreigners caused a slight localized flurry of interest. “You
see,” a man whispered in my ear, “we still pray to the Lord
despite theml y>

An old woman was selling tapers. Bob nudged me as Williams
— the left wing of our company, as it were — walked over to the
woman and paid a ruble for a taper; we were prepared to josh
him about helping the religious counterrevolution, but there was
a solemnity in his face that warned us against levity. But Rhys
Williams, who had known Lenin and Trotsky and still likes to
think himself a Bolshevik, was aware of our amusement. As we
left the cathedral, he turned to me sharply.

“Gene,” he said, “your heart is touched by the miseries of the
intelligentsia, but it remains unmoved by the persecution of these
monks and priests and honest believers. You’re as narrow in your
prejudices as any Bolshevik, only they’re different prejudices. I’m
not ashamed to admit that I feel the sorrows of these men of
religious faith who are going through as terrible an ordeal as
the intelligentsia, maybe worse.”

It was somewhere between Rostov and the Caucasian moun-
tains that those larger forces, working inscrutably behind the back
of Intourist, overtook our foreign sightseers and destroyed the
patterns we had been building in our minds and note-books.
Everything we had seen and thought and decided suddenly lost
its validity, everything had to be reconsidered in a new light. The
neat little piles of figures garnered as we went along were scat-
tered, the notes contributed by Comrades Verslin and Khvesin and
Margolin were canceled and their professions must be re-ap-
praised.

What happened was that forty-eight corpses, not invited by
Intourist, joined our tour. They remained with us and their

FORTY-EIGHT GHOSTS 357

shadow is on the books and the articles that came of this journey.
In every factory and sanatorium we visited, the ghostly forty-
eight were by our side, insisting on being heard j and behind them
were thousands of other ghosts conjured from the void by the
shock of a wholesale official murder.

On September 22, the press announced that the G.P.U. had
uncovered a “counter-revolutionary society” headed by Professor
Alexander Riazantsev of the meat industry, to undermine the
country’s food supply. Forty-eight professors, agronomists, and
administrators in the food trusts were under arrest charged with
sabotage.

The next day the press was noisy with editorials and resolutions
“demanding” the highest measure of social defense, death by
shooting, for the villains. These synthetic demands had only the
unsupported word of the G.P.U. to go upon, except the towering
fact that the nation’s food supplies were indeed depleted, rotted,
hopelessly inadequate, and confused.

And on September 24, two days after the “plot” had been
announced, the forty-eight were shot. Their names were neatly
listed in the newspapers, many of them names familiar to readers
of Russian scientific and technical publications.

This mass execution, though unscheduled, became the chief
event of the grand tour. The rest of the journey unrolled under
a cloud, the Russians self-consciously aloof from the arguments
that now swept through the company, the “lefts” among the for-
eigners a little hysterical in defending the slaughter. Everyone
was upset — half-apprehended terrors and despairs were suddenly
focused in the killing of the forty-eight, as in a sacrificial rite.
The rivers of publicity that must flow from the Intourist invest-
ment in international good-will would, unavoidably, be tinged
with blood.

The government now published excerpts from the alleged con-
fessions of the forty-eight: confessions extracted during months
of secret interrogation followed by a secret trial and secret shoot-
ings, published after the professors and administrators were dead
and buried. Buried? Years later, though there had been many
other mass executions, the ghosts of these forty-eight still haunted
the nation.

358

DOUBT

3

The tour to that point had drawn me back into, an older, more
comfortable attitude. I was leaning back once again on the price-
paid-for-the-future theory of suffering and terror, in a desperate
attempt to adjust my old faith to the new experiences. At every
important stop on the route, I had dashed off an article and sent
it on to Nathalie, my secretary, in Moscow for transmission abroad.
Those articles adhered to the placating arithmetical formula-
distress on one side of the ledger and the planned future on the
other, with the balance in the Kremlin’s favor. Against the muddy
squalor of Nijni-Novgorod, the “Ford” factory} against the bar-
ren despair of Stalingrad, the tractor factory; against the liqui-
dation of the kulaks, the triumphs of Comrade Margolin’s state
farm. These articles, practically unedited, were published as a
series in the NLoscow News , which is proof enough that they were
a successful effort to whip my conscience into line.

With the shooting of the forty-eight, I was hurled back
abruptly to the point where the horrors of liquidation at the be-
ginning of the year had left me. I felt again that something bar-
barous, ugly, and inhuman had been mixed into the socialist dream.

“Now the Kremlin,” I said in the course of an argument, “has
acted to solve the meat shortage by slaughtering forty-eight pro-
fessors.”

This gory saying was duly reported and deposited against me
in my dossier. It became the keynote of some of the travel stories
written by the government’s guests. Forty-eight deaths more or
less were in themselves of small consequence: that the socialist
hope was in the keeping of people capable of inflicting those deaths,
boasting of them as a proof of their “Leninist firmness,” surround-
ing the blood sacrifice with a hocus-pocus of jejune lies, post-
humous confessions, and elaborate stupidities, seemed to me the
crux of the tragedy.

We went to one of the meetings (hundreds of them were re-
ported in the papers day after day) in which “the proletariat fer-
vently thanked the glorious G.P.U., the unsheathed sword of the
revolution, for its splendid work in liquidating this dastardly
plot.” We saw no fervor, but only lukewarm routine applause for

FORTY-EIGHT GHOSTS 359

lukewarm routine speeches and routine acceptance of another reso-
lution prepared in advance by the steering committee. No one,
least of all the speakers, believed that this audience approved the
wholesale killings. Even Russians, inured to such things, shud-
dered at this deed.

Only one correspondent among all those who reported Soviet
news regularly for the outside world took the executions non-
chalantly in his stride. “To your correspondent,” the New York
Times man wrote, “the most surprising thing is that the punish-
ment was so long delayed. . . . With due allowance for the igno-
rance and inefficiency and for the difficulty of organizing state or
municipal distribution in a backward country, it is hard to believe
there was no sinister intent behind such appalling waste. Anyway,
the Soviet public believed there was and clamored for stern
justice.”

That clamor was only in his imagination, of course, and a clamor
for stern justice for dead men based on posthumous statements —
statements, moreover, which sounded strangely alike, as though
dictated by one mind — is in itself fantastic enough. The “sinister
intent” must have continued after the minds where it existed had
been consigned to the worms, because the “appalling waste” grew
ever more appalling.

There was a saying in the old days which ran, “Russia is big
and the tsar is far away.” That saying was paraphrased for me in
Tifiis, the lively Caucasian capital, when I commented on the
softer, less hysterical mood in the city: “The U.S.S.R. is big and
Stalin is far away.” The fact that Stalin is himself a Georgian sur-
rounded by other Georgians only added spice to the remark.

The woes that afflicted the rest of the country were sufficiently
in evidence here too, but Tiffis would not let itself be depressed
by lack of food and goods and personal safety. The difference is
really one of climate and scenery. Here we were in the South, in
a South made wondrous by the Caucasian mountains and valleys
and the pounding Black Sea. Soviet Georgia is a Switzerland and
Italy rolled into one, a Switzerland on the Mediterranean as it
were.

The city fathers of Tiffis greeted the group of visiting journalists
with a party such as would be almost impossible in Moscow. Hos-

360 DOUBT

pitality is a virtue of which the Georgians are especially proud.
The hosts set a pace in drinking which even parched Americans
found it hard to follow. Dignified officials threw themselves into
wild Caucasian dances, and they even aided and abetted the for-
eigners in dancing the infidel fox-trots.

An American journalist rose to express the appreciation of our
group. I confess that I framed it for him to be called upon
because he was so far gone in his cups. But he rallied nobly to
the call. Rising slowly to his feet and balancing himself carefully,
he looked around at the friendly, smiling faces, and he was sure
that he was no longer in Russia.

££ We’re very grateful,” said he, “very grateful, and damn glad
to be here. You know we had to get through Russia to get here
and we’re damn glad to be in a place again where people can smile
and be happy. Yes, sir, damn glad!” And he collapsed.

Our communist hosts applauded and drank another toast to
America. Of course, they did not understand a word he was say-
ing, and the volunteer interpreter did not tell them.

The Caucasian and Crimean riviera provides symbols of the
changes wrought by the revolution in such dramatic sharpness that
one suspects a master stage director behind the scenes. Bearded
peasants, the primordial loam still clotted in their pores and hair,
lounge in the spacious pavilions of Livadia, the summer residence
of Nicholas the Last. Dressed cleanly in the gray sanatorium uni-
forms, they wander uneasily amidst the trappings of their late
“Little Father.” The scene seems to have been made to order —
probably it was. In turning over the tsar’s favorite palace to the
simplest moujiks as a vacation resort, the Bolsheviks must have
had an eye to the theatrical effects of their act.

Everywhere along the great stretch of natural playground, the
palaces of grand dukes and millionaire merchants were being used
by workers and peasants. Sallow-skinned factory girls strolled
along the cypress-lined paths through gardens originally laid out
for grand-ducal mistresses. They were installed (as was our party
of journalists) in a gorgeous chalet brought piecemeal from Switz-
erland to Gagri’s mountain flank by a Russian nobleman. It all
begins to unfold as a grand pageant} no Stanislavsky or Rein-

FORTY-EIGHT GHOSTS 36 I

hardt could have done anything better to summarize the funda-
mental fact of the revolution.

In isolated spots, we found dim reflections of past elegance.
There were several vacation places reserved for the G.P.U. and
higher officials: quieter, less crowded, with an air of superiority
setting them off from the popular resorts. And there were the
few hotels and sanatoria still open to individual visitors at rela-
tively exorbitant prices. Here the wives of professional men, well-
paid actors, and writers made a pathetic attempt to ape the French
riviera. There was an element of the comic, too, in their efforts
to dress up and to revive a little of the glitter associated with
superior seaside vacationing.

In Yalta — where I abandoned the company for pressing work
in Moscow — we lived in a meandering old hotel overlooking the
harbor. Several foreign freighters were in port. Gay sun-tanned
groups from the surrounding sanatoria enlivened the main streets.
The echoes of accordions and laughter came to us through the
balmy night air. For a moment, we seemed to be far from the
privations and fears of which we had seen so much in those weeks.

Then we turned down a side-street. It was after midnight. A
block or two and we came upon a straggly line stretching from a
closed, dark shop. Some fifty men and women sat on boxes or on
the sidewalks, several were stretched out asleep in the queue.
Only the hour made this scene unusual.

“What are you waiting for?” we asked one of the women.

“How do I know?” she answered. “Maybe a herring, a bit
of meat if we’re lucky.”

“Most likely nothing,” a man near her said.

“But the shop is closed — ”

“It will open at eight in the morning,” the man explained.
“I’ve been waiting since eleven tonight.”

“Don’t you have to work tomorrow?” I asked.

“No, it’s my free day. Other nights my wife waits on line.
Unless one waits all night there is not a chance of getting any-
thing.”

Not in itself a startling piece of information. But somehow the
joy was no longer in the echoes of laughter and accordions. The
forty-eight ghosts accompanied us to the hotel.

IX. Rasstrel!

OF ATT , the enormities contrived in the haloed name of socialism,
the most singular, perhaps, was a decree offering generous cash
rewards to patriots who informed on relatives, friends, and neigh-
bors. Nothing niggardly about the offer; 25%, a full quarter
share, of all money, valuables, and other property seized by the
government would go to the informer. The despised profit motive
invoked for a fittingly despicable purpose! Somewhere in the
Elysian fields, the shades of Marx and Lenin (if they are on
speaking terms after all that has happened) had a delicate prob-
lem of dialectics to argue over.

Whether the patriot, having collected his 2 5% of the booty
and been thereby enriched perhaps beyond the bounds of pro-
letarian decency, was thereafter a proper subject for profitable
denunciation in turn by his best friend or favorite child was not
made entirely clear in the decree.

But whatever the wording of the law, it may be assumed that
the government in one way or another got that quarter back. For
the government was in need of capital, desperately in need, espe-
cially the kind acceptable to capitalists abroad. Even in lesser mat-
ters it had long ago thrown off the encumbrance of principles and
ethical prejudices; small reason why it should not go the limit
when the urgency referred to capital, money, the very proto-
plasmic stuff of its new economic religion.

Denunciation, night raids, searchings, hostages. The victims were
chiefly disfranchised people, intellectual trash, those receiving
money from relatives abroad: people, in short, upon whom neither
sympathy nor bothersome legalities need be wasted. The formal
pretext for seizing the remnants and scourings of wealth from the
Nep period or the pre-deluge epoch was “re-taxation” on past
earnings. Fearful that the culprits might hide some of their be-
longings, they were not notified in advance. First, the G.P.U.

rasstrel! 363

swooped down on them at night and made a thorough inventory
of what they owned, tearing up floor boards and rafters, ripping
open pillows and mattresses in search of concealed money or
jewels. Then the assessors had something to go by 5 the “tax” was
usually a safe distance above 100% of the inventoried property.
If the victim and his family were allowed to remain in their “liv-
ing space,” or even in the city, despite their failure to pay the
f ull tax, they had ample cause to bless their luck.

It was an arduous undertaking, and volunteer brigades of work-
ers demonstrated their devotion to the Five Year Plan in Four
Years by assisting in the searchings. Informing on one’s neigh-
bors has ever been a source of human pleasure, and now it was
also a well-paying business, almost the only enterprise for private
profit countenanced by the enthroned revolution. The nightly
chores of raids, searchings, and arrests grew larger all the time
and the G.P.U. had need of volunteers: “light cavalry” is one of
the proud names applied to the brigades by a grateful press.

Where the taxation comedy could not for some reason be played,
a “voluntary contribution to the PiatUetka n was extracted, duly
attested by a signed statement to that effect. Future research in
the archives of the early 1930’s will disclose stacks of these state-
ments, a very epidemic of patriotic philanthropy, the more remark-
able because the givers usually had small reason to love the gov-
ernment upon whom they lavished this charity. Such was the magic
of the revolution, historians will find, that even its natural enemies
were moved to benefactions in its favor.

The outward sign of the state hunger for capital was in inflation
of the Soviet currency. Between May and October of 1930, the
rubles in circulation increased by 35%. Russians referred to the
paper as sovznaki — “Soviet signs”— to distinguish it from real
values such as gold or foreign money. When cabmen demanded
a grivenyik, literally ten kopeks, to take one from the station to
the hotel, they meant ten rubles, one kopek being their contemp-
tuous valuation of the ruble. People asked: “Which is the jolliest
currency for traveling with abroad?” and the answer was: “The
ruble— everybody laughs at it.” Officially valued at fifty-one cents,
the ruble in truth had a purchasing value of three or four cents
provided there was something to purchase; but the shortage of

364 DOUBT

some goods and the complete absence of others often turned the
ruble into an empty symbol.

The collapse of popular faith in the currency led to an extraor-
dinary episode late in 1930. The Soviet Union awoke one morning
to find itself mysteriously short of small change 5 copper and silver
coins were annoyingly few and in several days disappeared alto-
gether. A little thing, it would seem, but the machinery of every-
day life, already complicated and burdensome enough, was put
further out of joint. Clerks in shops, conductors on street-cars,
peddlers in the markets could not make change. The banks and
post-offices rapidly ran dry of all coins. Beggars stood with empty
cups, since no one had coins to spare. The telephone pay-stations,
normally overcrowded, now stood idle.

The mystery was not mysterious after all. Millions of peasants
throughout the country had decided by a common impulse— one
of those inexplicable brain waves sweeping with the speed of light
across seven thousand miles — to hoard silver and copper. Sud-
denly and almost simultaneously throughout the vast nation, the
peasants lost the last shred of respect for the national currency and
held on to coins for their intrinsic worth as metals. Rapidly, the
whole supply was drained off into their coffers.

Municipal authorities hurriedly issued “scrip” in denominations
from one to ten kopeks. Stores gave credit slips instead of cash
for change. A week or two and the crisis was over.

Is it a curious intuition or a telepathic flash that moves millions
of simple people continents apart to some common action, though
they have no leadership, no contacts, no press? Again and again
I have seen them act— or rather, react— with amazing unanimity.
Thus it was in the previous winter, when peasants separated by
a thousand miles met forcible collectivization in exactly the same
way, by slaughtering their cows, as consistently as though they had
conspired in advance. But the hoarding of coins, less important in
itself, was the clearest indication of this almost psychic mass con-
sciousness.

Police-minded officials instantly shrieked “Plot!” — a kulak plot
or Trotskyist plot to destroy the Five Year Plan. Foreign reporters
echoed “Plot!” because the word fits nicely into headlines and
because the newspaper mind, like the police mind, thrives on

rasstrel!

3 6 5

melodrama. A few of us hinted darkly at “sinister” influences,
precisely as one of us had done in smoothing over the forty-eight-
fold execution.

Like those doctors who prescribe the same medicine for all ail-
ments, the Kremlin was prescribing the death penalty to cure its
social ailments. Rasstrel / How many times the word — “shooting”

* — crashed like thunder in open court! How many more times
behind the sealed doors of military and G.P.U. courts!

Railroad accidents were growing at an alarming rate, owing
primarily to the excessive load thrown on a disorganized system
and inferior rolling stock $ these physical faults would be corrected
in the course of time, no doubt, but meanwhile — the death pen-
alty for careless railroad workers.

More and more Soviet commercial and diplomatic agents in
foreign countries hesitated to obey orders to return home, chiefly
because they were afraid of the G.P.U. The result: the death
penalty in absentia for such hesitancy.

Outlawed intellectuals, persecuted peasants, rejected commu-
nists, discontented workers in droves tried to steal across the fron-
tier despite the heavy guards and bloodhounds. The result: the
death penalty for those caught in the act.

And so the hoarding of coins, too, was now made a capital
crime. A few of the guilty peasants were actually condemned to
death and the verdict ostentatiously published. It is unlikely that
the enforcement went much beyond that: to shoot all who were
guilty of hoarding would have cost the government more metal
in bullets than it could collect in coin. But the decree stood, pre-
sumably stands yet. In any event, the coins were back in circu-
lation. Soon, the government decided that if there was to be any
hoarding it would do the job itself. It withdrew all the silver
coinage from circulation, putting a cheap nickel alloy in its place.

The same urgency in the matter of capital forced the Kremlin
to dispose of its products in foreign markets in as large quantities
as possible, often at ridiculously low prices. Soviet wheat, butter,
fish, eggs, petroleum, pulpwood— most of them sorely needed at
h ome _ were poured upon the world in alarming volume. This
time, it was the turn of frightened capitalist competitors in those
markets to cry frantic “Plot!” and discern sinister motives. The
U.S.S.R., they howled, was “dumping” goods below cost of manu-

DOUBT

366

facture in order to undermine capitalism and stimulate world revo-
lution. Many governments placed hinderments to the flow o£
Soviet products, several announced total embargoes. Cloaking their
economic fears with a belated and lop-sided humanitarianism, they
now raised the issue of “forced labor.” The fact that the charge
was in many instances correct is neither here nor there: capitalists
were no more concerned with the horrors in Soviet labor camps
than with slavery in Abyssinia or chain gangs in Mississippi.

Technically, “dumping” means the sale of goods below cost of
manufacture. But how could anyone figure those costs, when all
labor and all products were the property of the same state which
did the exporting? What was the cost of producing lumber, when
the forests and the supply of exile and outright convict labor alike
were almost inexhaustible? The truth is that all labor based on
rations, inflated money and endless compulsions is an approxi-
mation of prison labor. There are no unemployed slaves.

The Soviet government’s denials of forced labor put the finish-
ing touches on the diverting Olympiad of hypocrisy involved in
the “anti-dumping” campaign. “Prisoners everywhere work, why
should not ours?” the Kremlin asked indignantly, thus evading
the issue, which was why the U.S.S.R. possessed so many hundreds
of thousands of prisoners. It did not explain whether a million
or so men and women transported forcibly to places where there
was only one job and one employer and then given a free choice
of employment were “forced labor” or not.

For the special purpose of appeasing American public opinion,
an American “commission” was dispatched to the lumber area and
in due time it attested truthfully that it had not seen forced labor.
No one in the foreign colony was more amused by this clowning
than the “commissioners” themselves. They were: a salesman of
American machinery, long resident in Moscow and dependent on
official good-will for his business 5 a young American reporter with-
out a steady job and therefore in the U.S.S.R. by sufferance of
the government 5 and the resident secretary of the American-
Russian Chamber of Commerce, a paid employee of the organi-
zation whose usefulness depended on maintaining cordial relations
with the Soviet authorities.

I knew all three men intimately, and it is betraying no secret to
record that each of them was as thoroughly convinced of the wide-

rasstrel! 367

spread employment of forced labor in the lumber industry as
Hamilton Fish or Mr. Deterding. They went to the North for
the ride, or because it was difficult to refuse, and they placated
their conscience by merely asserting ambiguously that they per-
sonally had seen no signs of forced labor 5 they did not indicate
that they made no genuine effort to find it and that their official
guides steered the “investigation.”

Their findings, published with all solemnity and transmitted
obediently by the American correspondents to the United States,
were a good deal along the line of a later “commission” in search
of forced labor in the Don Basin coal area. One of the “commis-
sioners,” the famous American photographer with the more famous
three children of Around the World in Rleven Years , Jimmy
Abbe, put it to me this way:

“Sure, we saw no forced labor. When we approached anything
that looked like it, we all closed our eyes tight and kept them
closed. We weren’t going to lie about it.”

2

The second year of the Plan provided victories enough and to
spare for propaganda purposes: the press in October was able to
list hundreds of enterprises brought into operation that year. But
the hallelujahs were neither as loud nor as jubilant as the year
before. The margins of failure to achieve the over-ambitious “con-
trol figures” for the fiscal year were especially wide in heavy
metals, transportation, coal and factory construction ; in the essen-
tials, that is to say, of an industrialized society.

Each of these failures, moreover, affected the others, for an
integrated industrial system like a chain is no stronger than its
weakest link 5 a steel mill without coal is completed only in the
statistical sense, since it will not produce steel; and coal produc-
tion without adequate transportation to move it is likewise a sta-
tistical triumph only. Transportation troubles were especially haras-
sing. Besides, the planned increase in productivity of labor was
far in arrears and the quality indices were in many cases falling
instead of rising.

The Plan had taken curious turns, its outstanding achievements
and outstanding difficulties alike being largely unexpected and cer-

DOUBT

368

tainly unplanned. The plan for agrarian collectivization stood for-
mally accomplished in less than two years, seemingly the greatest
success of all. But it was surely not an unmixed blessing, consider-
ing the disastrous loss of livestock, the terrible shortage of food-
stuffs, and the problem of peasant opposition still to be solved.
Catastrophic inflation was under way where a strengthening of the
currency had been planned. Living standards and “real wages”
were depressed where percentages of improvement has been metic-
ulously planned. Thinly veiled types of conscript labor and ex-
tensive concentration camps, neither of them listed in the detailed
volumes of the published Plan, had become essential features of it.

A number of the most advertised victories, in addition, were of
dubious character. The boast that millions more workers had been
drawn into industry than originally planned was a most illusory
triumph, though many self-styled economists abroad accepted it
innocently as such. If those economists had planned to build an
outhouse with two laborers, but had been obliged to use four
laborers, they would scarcely have boasted of “ioo% over-ful-
fillment of the plan.” Yet they accepted just that boast on a na-
tional scale from Soviet sources uncritically.

The vaunted “liquidation of unemployment” was in large meas-
ure due to the low productivity of labor per unit. Two men had
to be put to work where it was hoped one would suffice. Women
had to be torn away from their home duties or their leisure and
put to hauling logs, running machines, acting as hod-carriers and
street cleaners. That might be naively glorified as equality of the
sexes but it represented a most unsavory “overfulfillment” of the
unemployment plans.

Not only did the Five Year Plan job take a lot more labor than
planned, but it cost a lot more money than planned. That, too,
was shouted to the skies as a glorious overfulfillment! And pro-
fessional economists, among them some who hated Bolshevism but
seemingly hated thinking more, applauded. Not only did it take
four workers to build their outhouse instead of the two planned,
but the job cost twice as much as they had expected — hooray!
2 + 2 = 5....

These optical illusions kept the hosanna-singers at home and
abroad happily thrilled; they were ignored or accepted with ill-
concealed sarcasm by the mass of Russians $ but they worried the

rasstrel!

369

leaders. Shrill optimism covered a deep and pervasive discom-
fiture. The hunt for scapegoats grew more spirited. New attacks
on Rykov, Bukharin, and other alleged Rights filled the press —
by the end of the year, Rykov was pushed out of the post for-
merly held by Lenin, the chairmanship of the Council of People’s
Commissars, and the colorless, uninspired Molotov was put in his
place. Prominent economists and administrators, among them men
in key positions not only in industry but in the central planning
institutions, were arrested charged with sabotage, espionage, coun-
ter-revolution: the agricultural expert, Professor Kondratiev, the
leading statistician, Professor Groman, the greatest Russian au-
thority on thermodynamics, Professor Leonid Ramzin, hundreds
of their kind, thousands of less important personalities.

The time was ripe for another of those pyrotechnical demon-
stration trials to serve as circus for lack of bread, to dramatize the
idea of a nation besieged by enemies within and without. The
trial was already in the making — thousands were being sifted for
those few who would tell a convincing story willingly and im-
pressively.

Eight were finally selected, with Professor Ramzin heading the
list. There could just as easily have been eighty or eight hun-
dred ; the government revealed that at least two thousand were
in prison as directly implicated in the same alleged conspiracy.
But the stage directors had decided on a small cast.

X. “Death to Wreckers!”

PLANNED hysteria reached its highest pitch in the Ramzin
affair. Few things in Soviet history can compare for the size of
the audience and the calculated melodrama of the proceedings.
In my mind it figures as the classic example of the demonstration
trial — those attributes which set the show trial off from ordinary
trials seem to me to have been most sharply delineated in this
instance.

In subsequent years there would be trials more significant his-
torically, particularly those that ended with the annihilation of
Old Bolsheviks like Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, Piatakov, Sere-
briakov, and military heroes of the revolution like Marshal Tuk-
hachevsky and General Yakir. But not one of them was to ap-
proach the Ramzin show for scientifically inflated sensationalism
and for the transparency of its make-believe.

Consider the dimensions of the conspiracy, as outlined in the
indictment published on November u, 1930, and developed at
the trial that began two weeks later. An underground “Industrial
Party” comprising thousands of Russian engineers and official
planners allegedly worked for years with the connivance of the
General Staffs of a dozen nations. Its activities supposedly in-
volved such names as Raymond Poincare, Aristide Briand, Colonel
T. E. Lawrence of Arabia and Sir Henry Deterding abroad, and
men in key positions in the Five Year Plan at home. By under-
mining Soviet industry the ground was to be prepared for a sud-
den and concerted foreign attack. Even the slate of the new gov-
ernment to take control after the rout of the Soviets was sup-
posedly drawn up. Counter-revolution on an all-European scale:
as startling a picture as was ever unveiled by any regime.

Consider the audience. All the gadgets of ballyhoo were used
to bring the fears and angers of a nation to a boil 5 and several
dozen representatives of the world press were on hand to report
the hysteria for other nations. The exaggerated frights and enthu-

37 o

“death to wreckers !”

37 1

siasms evoked by events in Russia in a world suffering economic
jitters helped to draw all eyes to the improvised courtroom in the
faded magnificence of the former Nobles 5 Club.

And consider, what was of the most immediate significance, the
background of embattled desperation within the Soviet frontiers.
A ruthless straining of energies under conditions of semi-starva-
tion; political pressures without precedent even in Russia; the
unfoldment of a system of involuntary labor for millions of pris-
oners and economic conscripts — any spectacle to explain and justify
this background had need for melodrama of the most pyrotechnic
kind.

And it is as a spectacle that unavoidably I must think of the
trial. I find it hard to discuss it seriously as a judicial procedure.
The guilt of the accused had been fixed and accepted as beyond
doubt in advance; the object of the trial was simply to demon-
strate that guilt as effectively as possible, for purposes not even
remotely related to justice in the legal sense. The flood of carbon-
copy resolutions urging the death penalty (one of them by the
Academy of Science!) took such guilt for granted. There could
be no flaws in procedure, no miscarriage of justice; an inept scene
would merely be a blunder in technique. It is in terms of drama
— of a political morality play — that this, and all other demon-
stration trials, must be judged. How else, when the defendants,
their “defense counsel , 55 prosecution, and judges all work together
to prove a plot? When, indeed, the accused often outdo their
accusers in their eagerness to make the official story stick?

The demonstration trial is the unique Bolshevik contribution
to the art of propaganda. Though couched in the verbiage and
set in the general pattern of formal justice, with judges and law-
yers and witnesses, the resemblance ends there. Nothing is allowed
to occur, except by sheer accident, that is not prescribed in the
indictment-libretto. Every actor, from the judges down to the
“extras , 55 knows his assigned role and dovetails it nicely with
every other role. Should he stumble, or begin to improvise, every-
one is embarrassed and moves quickly to bring the action back to
the script.

Like all other correspondents, I was instructed to spare no
efforts or cost in reporting the Ramzin proceedings. For once there
would be no counting of words, no “downhold 55 orders or stinting.

DOUBT

372

I did not miss a single session. I became as familiar with the court
and its people, with the routine of the whole business, as a soldier
with his trench. And when it was ended I emerged a little dazed,
like one returning from a long and unpleasant journey who must
slowly re-establish contact with a humdrum existence. The ex-
perience remains with me as an organized and clean-edged
memory.

More than half a million workers from the factories and offices
of Moscow marched through the snows in the grayish dusk on
November 25. They marched under banners inscribed, “Death
to the agents of imperialism!”, “Kill the wreckers!”, “No mercy
to these class enemies!” Hour after hour as night engulfed the
city the gigantic parade rolled past the Nobles 7 Club and its
shouts of “Death! death! death! 77 could be heard in the columned
ballroom where the trial was under way since three in the after-
noon.

The eight scholarly men in the prisoners 7 box heard the baying
outside; the several thousand privileged spectators jammed into
the chamber as for a circus, under fifty-six blazing chandeliers,
heard it; and some seventy-five Russian and foreign reporters at
the foot of the platform. In thousands of towns and cities other
such parades were taking place at the same time, and these, too,
we could hear across the vast distances. The same tom-tom of
“Death! death! 77 pulsed through endless editorials, speeches, reso-
lutions, radio exhortations, cartoons, billboard signs.

It was a synthetic delirium, its very phrases prescribed; a litany
of blood-thirst. At the proper moment it would be shut off as
artificially as it had been loosed upon the country. Only the bitter-
ness and hatred were real, because they sprang from real pain and
anger.

The courtroom scene was a repetition of the Shakhty trial, ex-
cept that its temper was heightened and its mechanics more prac-
ticed. Prosecutor Krylenko 7 s bullet-head shone in the arc-lights,
his flat Scythian features tensed in his cruel sneer. With the judges
on the raised dais sat a factory worker from Leningrad, one Peter
Ivanov, the inert symbol of the proletariat in whose name the
show was unwound. Several loges were crowded by members of
the diplomatic corps, many of whose governments were involved

“DEATH TO WRECKERS! ” 373

in the charges. The prisoners’ dock, draped in gray cloth, was a
speck of alien color in the pervading red.

Photographers, reporters, electricians worked in a panic of hurry 5
they crawled through the solemnities intent on their own business
like scene-shifters in a Chinese play. The paraphernalia of pub-
licity — microphones, klieg lights, cameras, rows of typewriters in
the corridor section fenced off for the correspondents — held first
place j the eight defendants seemed supernumeraries. The para-
phernalia of propaganda and the cries of “Death!” rolling in from
all sides and pounding against the outer walls. . . . The opening
day in particular had a touch of shrill holiday about it.

Next to Krylenko stood a fat black beetle of a man, with a
Mephistophelian beard, waxing red and choleric and spluttering
from time to time, but mostly silent and glowering. That was
Krylenko’s assistant 5 throughout the trial, behind the refined
stiletto-cruelty of the prosecutor the crude sledgehammer cruelty
of this assistant.

The defendants were the least villainous looking of mortals,
several of them wearing neat professional beards and spectacles.
They shuffled papers and made copious notes, as though awaiting
their turn to speak at a scientific conference. They seemed a meek,
harmless and unimpressive group to have roused such a storm.

After the published indictment had been read, each of the eight
in turn stood up and pleaded guilty. Only two of them, Sergei
Kuprianov and Xenephon Sitnin, accepted defense lawyers, the
others waiving this dubious privilege. Sitnin, fat-faced and oily,
was the one whose young son had demanded his death before the
trial. This was by now a standardized piece of business in impor-
tant show trials. “My father is to me a class enemy, nothing more,”
young Sitnin told the press and his words were published as an
example to Soviet youth.

For three hours Ramzin on the opening day told the story of
his political sins. A small, clean-shaven man in his early forties,
with a square white face and drawn features, his forehead high
and pale under a mop of light-brown hair, he spoke in the calm,
precise tones of a trained lecturer. It was almost impersonal. The
Industrial Party, he said, had been born in 1925 and by 1929 it
had more than two thousand members. Its leaders, going abroad
frequently on technical missions, were able to make contacts with

DOUBT

374

the French General Staff, Balkan military men and rich emigres.
Contacts were also made through Monsieur “A” and Monsieur
“K,” foreign consuls in Moscow — they figured as initials through-
out, though they sat in the diplomatic box and we all knew who
they were.

Ramzin’s recital, as monotonous as a technical classroom lecture,
sounded abstract and academic. It was clear on the larger objectives
but fuzzily obscure on details. Like so much of the economic plan-
ning of which he spoke, the counterrevolutionary planning seemed
grandiose in blueprint but unrealized in practical application. Kry-
lenko would have a job of it, we all felt, to fill in the outline
with convincing detail. The kind of regime projected by the In-
dustrial Party, according to Ramzin, was one dominated by engi-
neering minds: an interesting anticipation of the technocracy ideas
which soon thereafter swept America.

Day after day the eight men took turns, singly and in batches
of two and three, in front of the microphone that carried their
voices to millions, while cameramen ground away, reporters rushed
back and forth importantly, and giant arc-lights flared and sizzled.
At first, the older men shaded their eyes against the criss-crossed
streams of hot light but in time they gave up and bore the drench-
ing without a struggle. Day after day, they asserted their guilt
and accented their humiliation, while the khaki-clad Krylenko and
his black beetle grimaced and glowered.

There was a monumental irony in the vast precautions taken
to safeguard the court against mythical dangers of assault, as the
conspirators competed in belly-crawling confessionals. Subtly the
idea was conveyed that bands of desperate saboteurs might try to
pull off a daring rescue, or that any minute the corpulent Poincare
might come dashing at the head of an army of invaders. The
ballyhoo created a sense of imminent danger of foreign attack.
The aging Maxim Gorky addressed an eloquent appeal to the
workers and peasants and intellectuals of the world to act quickly
to stop intervention. The incongruity between these assumptions
of imminent counter-revolution and invasion and the meekness
of those contrite and ineffectual professors attested that human
credulity is indeed inexhaustible.

Even as in the Shakhty trial, the attempt to provide concrete
detail for the generalized structure of international plotting fiz-

a DEATH TO WRECKERS!” 375

zled. Gloatingly Krylenko drew out specific samples of sabotage
and spying — but they seemed petty in relation to the sweeping
charges. The amounts mentioned as bribes over a period of many
years came to ludicrously small sums for the world-shaking job
allegedly performed. The supposed connivings with premiers
and military commanders and millionaire plotters, when the mat-
ter came down to cases, proved curiously indirect and inferential
at best. It was all done, if done it was, through intermediaries thrice
removed.

And not once in all the eleven days was any impersonal, docu-
mentary evidence introduced. The thousands of plotters must have
been models of circumspection and the secret service exceedingly
stupid, for there was not a scrap of paper, not a receipt or an
intercepted letter to bolster the state’s case. Nor was there a single
witness not himself a prisoner and therefore fighting to save his
own life. The trial ended as it began — with confessions made while
under G.P.U. control and mutual accusations by men in the shadow
of death. Watching through news columns darkly, the outside
world saw the mountain of propaganda in labor giving birth to
an anemic mouse of a plot.

Eleven days of trial, stretching deep into the night hours, left
small doubt that these men and hundreds like them despised the
Soviet regime, dreamed of its overthrow, and were ready to de-
liver it to enemies abroad or at home. Several of them were former
members of liberal political groupings (the Kadets, for instance)
and despite themselves betrayed that they still mourned the
perished dream of a democratic Russia on the French or Ameri-
can model. No doubt these men had talked counterrevolution
among themselves and with friends out of their pre-revolutionary
past in Europe. They clearly had encouraged emigre delusions
about the speedy ‘liberation” of Russia. They had been apathetic
toward the industrial tasks entrusted to them, and often had thrown
monkey-wrenches into the economic machinery.

More than enough, in short, to make them traitors in Bolshevik
eyes and deserving of traitors’ deaths. But on these truths the
state had elaborated a top-heavy superstructure of imaginative
falsehood and exaggeration to explain current hardships and to
justify current brutalities. The eight men in the court may have
been counterrevolutionary scoundrels, but the great international

DOUBT

376

plot seemed to me, and to most of the foreign observers, “sewn
with white thread,” as the Russian phrase has it.

A few of the stitches were pretty raw and obvious. Any tyro
of a defense attorney in a free court would have pulled out those
white threads and watched the case fall apart. For instance, the
slate of the new government to displace the Bolsheviks after a
successful counterrevolution, embodied in the confessions, con-
tained the names of two men who had long been dead at the
time the slate was supposedly drawn up. One of these dead men,
Riabushinsky, was scheduled for the premiership, no less. An-
other instance: at the time Ramzin is supposed to have talked with
Colonel Lawrence of Arabian fame in London, the Colonel was
not even in England.

Such tell-tale blunders in the structure of confessions the trial
took blithely in its stride. Defendants and defense lawyers alike
pretended not to notice the blunders, the Soviet press kept mum,
the foreign press was fed phony explanations, and the demonstra-
tion trial went on without a hitch. The defense was indistinguish-
able from the prosecution.

And all the time the thunder of vengeance rolled through the
land in still more editorial attacks, stereotyped resolutions, mass
meetings. That had no direct reference to the mumbo-jumbo of
examination and testimony in the courtroom.

2

The most weird hours, in this as in former trials, were provided
by witnesses dragged from the darkness of their G.P.U. cells
into the circus brilliance of this ballroom. They spoke their lines
hurriedly, in confusion, and were dragged off again to the dark-
ness where they had languished for months. To what fate? we
could not help wondering. The awareness of thousands of others
corralled in G.P.U. prisons — droves of professors and technicians
and officials under lock and key, of whom we were allowed to see
only a few samples — came to overshadow everything Slse in the
exhibition.

By what logic were the eight selected out of the mass? The
answer was not far to seek. The defendants in a show trial are
chosen because of their special fitness for their parts. Sometimes

“death to wreckers!”

377

willingly, more often unwillingly, they are cast for their roles in
the limelight. Not the degree of their guilt, but their social back-
grounds, their physical and psychological make-up — frequently
their capacity for self-abasement — are the primary considerations.
The government intended to paint a specific picture in the public
mind at home and abroad 3 these eight sufficed for the purpose.
We would know, in a general way, what happened to Ramzin
and the other seven ; we would never know what happened to the
thousands presumably tried and condemned behind closed doors.

One day the witness was Professor Osadchi, until his arrest
Vice-President of Gosplan and therefore one of the chief authors
of the Five Year Plan. Osadchi had been on this rostrum before.
In the Shakhty trial in 1928 he was one of the “people’s prosecu-
tors.” Now it appeared that he had been play-acting: at that time
he was already a member of the counterrevolutionary group. In-
stinctively we looked at the present “people’s prosecutors,” and
wondered whether they, too, would have their turn.

Osadchi was a large, pompous-looking old man, round-faced,
white-bearded, and spectacled, with a heavy rounded paunch. For
a full minute he stared into the audience, confused by the lights
and gadgets. Then he began to speak in harsh self-accusation.
And suddenly he began to sob aloud. “Let me live,” he begged
the audience, “let me live and my whole life will be devoted to
the proletariat and its Soviet power.” He was on the stage only
a few minutes, then was hustled off again.

On December 4, Krylenko made his closing address. He spoke
for four hours. Not so much the guilt of the accused men, but
the guilt of their kind of people at home and abroad was his
theme. He was underscoring the moral of the play. He read
selected translations from Paris papers describing a gathering of
Russian exiles — grand-dukes, bishops, merchants — which had pro-
tested against the Ramzin trial. The description drew guffaws of
laughter from the Moscow audience. Everything that had been
outlawed and crushed by the revolution was on trial, and the eight
defendants were little more than a few minor, unimportant proofs
of it all. Again and again he was interrupted by listeners with cries
of “Death to the wreckers.”

Two days later the eight men made their final pleas, one or two

378 DOUBT

in tears, the others with pedagogical calm. “This is my last public
lecture in fifteen years,” Ramzin smiled sadly. “Perhaps the case
is not quite as simple as the comrade prosecutor says. Man does
not risk his life for money alone. Two paths were open to us after
the revolution — one that led to the Kremlin, the other to Paris.
We chose Paris and this is where it led us. . . .” And in ending
he said, “We came to court not to defend ourselves but to capitu-
late. I am happy I confessed. My soul is quieter.”

“I have only a few more years to live,” said Alexander Fedotov.
“I am an old man. But I don’t want to die a traitor’s death. Give
me a chance to expiate my sins.” He was a tall, heavy, dignified
old man. He wore a black cutaway of ancient vintage and a stiff
collar and looked like an after-dinner speaker. Once or twice dur-
ing the trial his sense of grievance had broken through his caution
— he had defended his past as a liberal democrat. And as always
on those rare occasions when a prisoner showed a sign of self-
respect, the audience had been shocked into attention.

Victor Larichev, Nikolai Charnovsky, Ivan Kalinikov — all
begged and promised. A few tried flattery. The great and wise and
mi ghty proletariat, they said, surely would not be moved by
vengeance and could afford to be generous with broken-down,
unworthy creatures like themselves.

Larichev had been a member of the Gosplan. A wisp of a goatee
made his thin, sallow face more ineffectual and a little comic. “A
handful of intellectuals trying to overthrow the mighty prole-
tariat,” he had ridiculed himself and his comrades during the trial.
Charnovsky seemed the type of the pre-revolutionary harm: a
stolid, conservative landowner out of the pages of Turgenyev
or Tolstoy. The sixty-five-year-old Kalinikov, with his white hair,
his precise Van Dyke beard, and carefully pointed mustaches, had
also been in the Gosplan. “A man raised like myself,” he had ex-
plained to the court, as though demonstrating a technical prob-
lem, “could never understand why the lowly workers should rule.
... I was simply unfit to submit to the proletariat.”

And now, as we listened to the eight lacerating themselves,
swinging between an eagerness for the death that expiates and
tearful pleas for pity, pausing in the most subjective moments to
deliver generalizations on life and destiny, we knew that Dostoiev-
sky had not exaggerated his Russians.

“death to wreckers ! ^

379

Five of the men were condemned to death. The verdict brought
a storm of applause and cheers which the presiding judge could
not stop. Two days later these death sentences were commuted
to ten years of imprisonment. This unexpected act of mercy shocked
Russia more deeply than the verdict. Almost as suddenly as the
hysteria had been launched, it was now ended. The show was
over. Before long we heard that Ramzin and others were back
at work, talking to technical classes. The closing words in the
Nobles 5 Club were not their last lectures after all.

But for a few years — -until Hitler came to power in Germany
— France remained “the spearhead of intervention 75 in the official
propaganda. Poincare (“Poincare-War 57 he had been nicknamed)
displaced Austen Chamberlain as the chief devil in Soviet demon-
ology.

A second trial, closely linked with the Ramzin affair, took
place several months later. A group of prominent Mensheviks
was charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government — the
charge resolved, in the final analysis, into one of harboring Marxist
views unlike the official Kremlin version. The trial had more dig-
nity than the Ramzin affair. A few of the prisoners made a meek
defense of their faith, a feeble and tangential defense but suf-
ficiently impressive in a court-room ill-smelling with human deg-
radation.

I was vacationing in America when this second trial took place.
I followed the proceedings through the press reports. And I real-
ized how utterly impossible it was for the outside world to under-
stand the demonstration trial. No matter how often the point was
made that this was not ordinary justice, but staged, flood-lighted
revolutionary symbolism, the reader accepted it as a real trial
to ascer tain guilt or innocence. He read of witnesses and evidence
and confessions, judges and verdicts, and translated those words
in the language of his own experience with ordinary judicial pro-
cedures. He waited for the verdict, as though it had not been
prescribed in advance. Even I who had sat through such trials,
caught myself reading the dispatches about testimony and cross-
questioning as though it were all real.

An ironical fate pursues the Soviet show trials. Always some
magnificent lie throws its shadow on the whole texture of eager

380 DOUBT

confessions. In the Ramzin exhibition it was a “conspirator” who
had been dead for years before the conspiracy was hatched. In this
Menshevik trial the revealing lie was even more startling. One
of the leaders of the Second International, Rafael Abramovich,
was supposed to have made a secret visit to Russia on specified
dates in the summer of 1928 j the whole Menshevik plot centered
around that visit, and the defendants “confessed” meetings and
discussions in detail. Unfortunately for the G.P.U. stage direc-
tors, Abramovich was attending an International Socialist Congress
in Brussels at that very time. Photographs of the delegates made
at the very moment he was supposedly plotting in Moscow showed
Abramovich in Brussels.

That, too, the demonstration trial took in its stride. To this day
the Russian people are unaware of the cynical hoax, since the press
passed over it in silence.

XI. An Interview with Stalin

THE image of Stalin, immense, vague, sinister, had been expand-
ing rapidly upon men’s minds in the years since I came to Mos-
cow. More than ever an interview with him was the world’s most
coveted and apparently most hopeless newspaper prize. For the
fifth or sixth time I ventured to remind him of his “promise”
to receive me.

The provocation this time was more than ample. Giddy head-
lines throughout the world were announcing Stalin’s assassina-
tion. Rumors from Riga and Bucharest were re-enforced by rumors
from Helsingfors and Kaunas and confirmed by Warsaw and Ber-
lin. I asked for no more than a minute or two in his presence,
just time enough to obtain his personal denial and to attest that
he was indubitably alive.

Every other correspondent in Moscow saw and seized the same
opportunity, so that Stalin’s secretariat was besieged by reporters
of many nations, but most insistently by the go-getting Americans.
Letters, telephone calls, cablegrams from the home offices of news-
papers and agencies poured in upon Stalin’s staff urging that it
was his duty — nay, his great opportunity — to emerge at last from
behind the barriers and smite the rumor-mongers.

The “assassination” had come as the inevitable climax to a flood
of sensations out of neighboring capitals which none of our de-
nials could stem. It was the Soviet Union’s periodical dividend
on censorship, but a lot more gory and circumstantial than usual.
The mere existence of the censorship gave news sources on the
capitalist side of the Russian frontiers a specious authority, and
it must be admitted that on occasion Riga was able to report sig-
nificant Soviet events more quickly, and surely less inhibitedly,
than we in Moscow. Its batting average was not very high, but
every so often it hit a home run.

But that the border countries would know of major develop-
ments even unto bloodshed and rebellion in Moscow itself, with-

381

382 DOUBT

out the resident newspapermen being aware o£ it, was fantastic.
The Soviet capital is a huge whispering gallery: scandal and sen-
sation echo throughout the city like the rumble of thunder. And
there was probably no Moscow correspondent, however “friendly”
and “loyal,” who would have hesitated to flash news of the sort
now spread by Riga and other capitals, especially the alleged mur-
der of Stalin. The means for circumventing the censorship are al-
ways at hand, provided the reporter is willing to risk official repri-
mand or expulsion. The death of Stalin would have been a news
story worth the risk.

Not since the balmy days when Lenin and Trotsky were shoot-
ing and stabbing each other regularly in Riga and Warsaw dis-
patches, did imaginative journalism about mysterious shut-in Rus-
sia run so loose and wild. Starting with a few trenchant truths
about widespread arrests and disaffections (truths which the Mos-
cow correspondents did not exactly conceal but certainly soft-
pedaled) exaggeration and gullibility did the rest. Soon the Red
Army was exploding with mutiny, War Lord Voroshilov was de-
fying Stalin, the streets of Moscow were running with blood.
Red Square was strewn with corpses, and the government was
huddled in the center of the Kremlin waiting for the skies to
crash. An English traveler even gave the press his personal “eye-
witness” account of the blood and the cadavers.

We insisted that the first snows of the season showed no traces
of blood. In the center of the Kremlin, I advised my readers, I
found only an exclamatory band of tourists making its rounds
of palaces and churches under bored guides. As for Red Square,
I admitted that it did have one corpse: the embalmed body of
Lenin in its new mausoleum, with several hundred citizens queued
up for a glimpse of the father of Bolshevism. But rumor thrived
on denials. The defiant answer to our joint obduracy was the “as-
sassination” of Stalin.

Each flourishing a sheaf of messages from home editors re-
counting the exciting news, the correspondents pleaded for an in-
terview: the one thing that would smother rumor-mongering and
restore law and order in the U.S.S.R. for a doubting world. We
pleaded, but without real hope of success.

On the afternoon of November 23, my telephone rang. A man’s
voice in good English said:

AN INTERVIEW WITH STALIN 383

a Mr. Lyons? This is Comrade Stalin’s office.”

A frayed old gag — I was equal to the occasion. “You don’t
say! How very interesting! Give him my kindest regards, and
Mrs. Stalin too.”

“But this is Comrade Stalin’s secretary.” The voice was embar-
rassed. “Comrade Stalin has received your letter and wished me
to tell you that he will be glad to talk to you in an hour, at five
o’clock that is, in his offices at the Central Committee of the
Party.”

“Thank you, I shall be there.”

No tocsins were sounded, no flags were hoisted, no skies crashed,
but the impossible had come to pass! A simple telephone call
— and the unthinkable was suddenly as matter-of-fact as a cock-
tail party or train schedule. Stalin was about to give the first inter-
view since he had achieved his pinnacle of power.

Every minute brought the appointment nearer, nearer, like an
approaching locomotive, and suddenly it was right upon me,
huge, loud, puffing and formidable. I was in the ante-room to
Stalin’s office on Staraya Ploshchad (Old Square), with Charles
Malamuth of California University’s Slavonic Department; he
was with me when the thrilling telephone summons came through
and I mobilized him as emergency interpreter.

The headquarters of the Central Committee were just inside
the ancient Chinese Wall, a six-story building, plain and business-
like. The G.P.U. guards at the door were expecting me and passed
us through immediately; another guard led us to the ante-cham-
ber of the most powerful, most feared, least known human being
on the face of the globe. An amiable woman secretary asked us
to wait; Comrade Stalin would be free in a few minutes.

The building and this office were as unlike the usual, littered,
chaotic Soviet institution as possible: quiet, orderly, unhurried but
efficient. It was, above all, stamped with an unmistakable simplicity:
the hall-mark, I was to learn in the next hour or two, of Stalin
himself. I had a sense of concentrated authority, the more im-
pressive because it was devoid of the trappings of power, curi-
ously austere and self-assured, without elegance of gold braid
or shrieking symbols: power naked, clean, and serene in its strength.

Half a dozen or so people were waiting in this room, some for
Stalin, some for other leaders with offices on the same floor. A

DOUBT

384

tall, unshaven fellow, with matted black hair and dirty boots. An
elderly woman in a leather jacket, red kerchief on her head.

“Provincial Party secretaries, come to report or complain,”
Charlie guessed.

“Probably,” I said. “Imagine what the ante-chambers of the
former rulers were like, the pomp and grandeur, the courtiers
and generals, and look how simple all of this is! Stalin may be
inaccessible to reporters and diplomats, but I should judge from
these folks that he is accessible enough to his own Party people.”

We could not pursue this line of thought. The woman secretary
said Comrade Stalin was waiting, and an office boy led the way.

2

One cannot live in the shadow of Stalin’s legend without coming
under its spell. My pulse, I am sure, was high. No sooner, how-
ever, had I stepped across the threshold than diffidence and ner-
vousness fell away. Stalin met me at the door and shook hands,
smiling. There was a certain shyness in his smile, and the hand-
shake was not perfunctory. He was remarkably unlike the scowl-
ing, self-important dictator of popular imagination. His every
gesture was a rebuke to the thousand little bureaucrats who had
inflicted their puny greatness upon me in these Russian years.

We followed him to the extreme end of a long conference
table, where he motioned us affably to chairs and sat down him-
self. His personal interpreter, a young man with bushy black
hair, was there. Stalin pushed over a box of cigarettes, took one
himself, and we all lighted up. The standardized photographs
of Stalin show him smoking a pipe and I had a feeling of faint
disappointment that he was not measuring up to the cliches, even
in this regard.

In my letter the previous day, I had specifically asked for “only
two minutes” and I had assumed that the interview was to be
no more than a brief formality to enable at least one reporter
to testify that Stalin was still fully alive. But I saw him stretch
out his feet and lean back in leisurely fashion as though we had
hours ahead of us. With that natural gesture of relaxing in his
chair, Stalin turned a strait jacketed interview into an unhurried so-
cial call. I realized that there would be no time limitations.

AN INTERVIEW WITH STALIN 385

And here was I, unprepared for this generosity, with only one
question ready — the superfluous question whether he was alive
or not! I cursed myself inwardly for a bungler not to have mapped
out an organized campaign of interrogation that would probe to
the very center of the Soviet situation.

“Tell Mr. Lyons,” Stalin addressed his interpreter, “that I am
sorry I could not receive him before. I saw his letters, but I
cannot easily find the opportunity for interviews.”

There was no need for translation. My Russian would probably
be adequate to the occasion, I smiled, and if I got stuck, these
gentlemen would come to my rescue. Several times in the next
hour Stalin harked back to my letters. To this day I do not know
precisely why, among the score of permanent correspondents in
his capital — many of them less outspoken in their criticism of
the regime and more amenable to the discipline of the Press De-
partment — he had selected me for this first interview since his
rise to supreme power. Any one of a dozen other correspondents
would have served Moscow’s purpose just as well. But unques-
tionably my letters over more than a year played a part in the
selection.

“Comrade Stalin,” I began the interview, “may I quote you
to the effect that you have not been assassinated?”

He laughed. At such close range, there was not a trace of the
Napoleonic quality one sees in his self-conscious camera or oil
portraits. The shaggy mustache, framing a sensual mouth and a
smile nearly as full of teeth as Teddy Roosevelt’s, gave his swarthy
face a friendly, almost benignant look.

“Yes, you may,” he said, “except that I hate to take the bread
out of the mouths of the Riga correspondents.”

The room in which we sat was large, high-ceilinged, and fur-
nished simply almost to bareness. Its only decorations were framed
pictures of Karl Marx, Lenin, and Engels — there was no por-
trait of Stalin: probably the only office in all his empire with-
out one. Stalin wore the familiar olive-drab jacket with stand-up
collar, belted at the waist, and his trousers were tucked into high
black boots. The negligent austerity of his attire was of a piece
with that room. Though of vigorous physique, he seemed to me
older than his fifty-one years ; his face was large-featured and
fleshy, darker in tinge than I had expected and faintly pock-

386 DOUBT

marked, his shock of black hair thick, unruly, and touched with
gray.

For over an hour I asked questions and answered them. Again
and again the talk debouched into argument 5 I was aware after-
wards, though not at the time, that I did not hesitate to inter-
rupt him: another proof of the essential simplicity of a powerful
ruler who could put a reporter so completely at his ease. The
“ethics of bourgeois journalism” came in for considerable dis-
cussion ; though at the moment he had sufficient cause to be in-
dignant with that journalism, there was no bitterness in Stalin’s
comments.

I asked him about Soviet- American relations, about the chances
for world revolution, the progress of the Piatiletk® y and such
other obvious matters as came to my mind. He listened without
the slightest sign of impatience to my labored Russian and re-
peated sentences slowly when he thought I might not have grasped
the meaning. Often I reached a linguistic impasse from which
Charlie and the other interpreter retrieved me. Stalin never once
spoke impetuously, never once resorted to mere cleverness or
evasion. Sometimes he thought for many seconds before he re-
plied, his forehead furrowed in lines of concentration, and the
answers came in strangely schematized array: “firstly, secondly
. . . and finally. ...” I recalled that note he had sent me the
previous year with its “Motives: (a) . . . and (b) . . .” There
had been no affectation in it: that was how his mind worked. It had
been conditioned, perhaps, by long years devoted to driving ele-
mentary predigested ideas into simple minds, in simple a-and-b
formulations.

“It seems to me,” I said at one point in the rambling conver-
sation, “that the American press has been making a more de-
termined effort to obtain fair, objective news about the Soviet
Union than any other country. We have the largest group of
correspondents here and all of them, I think, trying to tell the
truth as they see it.”

“That’s right,” Stalin agreed thoughtfully. “Economic classes
in the United States are not yet quite as rigidly differentiated as
in Europe— you have no deeply rooted landed aristocracy.”

The economic interpretation of journalism! To Stalin, as to all
Bolsheviks, there are no “good” men and “bad” men, but only

AN INTERVIEW WITH STALIN 387

men reacting to their social environment and economic compul-
sions.

In the midst of the interview, someone opened the door and,
noting that Stalin was occupied, was about to withdraw. It was
Klementi Voroshilov, the Commissar of War!

“Oh, Pm sorry,” he smiled apologetically.

“No, no, do come in and join us, Comrade Voroshilov,” I said
boldly. As though cornering Stalin were not triumph enough
for one day, my luck was corralling the War Lord for me as
well.

Stalin smiled his assent and Voroshilov, having shaken hands
with Charlie and myself, joined the group at the table. Later I
wondered whether his arrival was quite as accidental as it seemed.
The sensational reports abroad had been full of supposed trouble
between Stalin and his military chief. But Voroshilov himself,
having heard of my doubts, declared that his intrusion had in-
deed been entirely fortuitous; a piece of luck which heightened
greatly the dramatic value of the interview.

Voroshilov plunged warmly into the conversation. He was brim-
ming with questions and opinions, slapped his thigh vigorously
to express satisfaction. His is a warm, high-mettled nature with
something impetuously boyish about it, a startling contrast to the
deliberate, methodical, very earnest Stalin. Voroshilov’s vitality
seemed effervescent against the immense, highly disciplined power
in reserve which characterized Stalin. Once or twice, I thought I
detected a shadow of annoyance on Stalin’s face at Voroshilov’s
ebullience, but I may have been mistaken.

I felt that I was taking more of Stalin’s time than I had any
right to do, and that the talk would go on and on interminably
if I did not call it off myself. Outside this office the tides of revo-
lution rose and fell, hammered at people’s lives and shivered the
certainties of the world. But here, with Stalin, there was no sugges-
tion of this violence and hectic urgency: he was enveloped in his
own atmosphere of calm assurance.

“Comrade Stalin, the press of the world is by this time in the
habit of calling you dictator,” I said. “Are you a dictator?”

I could see that Voroshilov waited with interest for the answer.
Stalin smiled:

“No, I am no dictator. Those who use the word do not under-

388 DOUBT

stand the Soviet system of government and the methods of the
Communist Party. No one man or group of men can dictate.
Decisions are made by the Party and acted upon by its chosen
organs, the Central Committee and the Politburo”.

“And now,” I said, my embarrassment all too evident, “may
I ask you some personal questions? Not that I myself care to pry
into your private life, but the American press happens to be in-
terested.”

“All right,” S talin consented. His tone implied amused astonish-
ment, as though the curiosity of bourgeois barbarians were beyond
communist comprehension.

Voroshilov chuckled, like a little boy at a circus. “Sure, that’s
what the world wants to know!” he said.

Under my questioning, Stalin thereupon admitted that he had
one wife, three children — one of them working, the other two
youngsters still in school. Voroshilov was not concealing his en-
joyment of the situation. When Stalin reached his five-year-old
daughter, his War Lord added in mock earnest: “And she has
as yet no well-defined political program.” And then: Didn’t I also
have a young daughter? he wanted to know. I told them that she
was in school in Berlin.

And thus it was, of all things, on an intimate domestic note
that the party broke up.

“I don’t want in any way to interfere with what you may write,”
Stalin said, “but I would be interested to see what you make of
this interview.”

“On the contrary,” I said, “I am anxious that you read my
dispatch before I send it. Above all things I should hate to mis-
represent anything you have said. The only trouble is that this
is Saturday night and the Sunday papers go to press early. Get-
ting the story to you and back again may make me miss the early
editions.”

“Well, then, never mind.” He waved the matter aside.

I thought quickly.

“But if I could get a Latin-script typewriter,” I said, “I could
write my story right here and now and show it to you immedi-
ately.”

Stalin thought that was a good idea. With Charlie and myself
at his heels, he walked into the adjoining room, where several

AN INTERVIEW WITH STALIN 389

secretaries were standing around chatting and asked whether they
couldn’t dig up a Latin typewriter. The relation between Stalin
and his immediate employees was entirely human, without so much
as a touch of restraint. To them, obviously, he was not the formid-
able dictator of one-sixth of the earth’s surface but a friendly,
comradely boss. They were deferential without being obsequious.

The typewriter was found and I was installed in a small room
to do my stuff. I could hear Stalin suggesting that they send
in tea and sandwiches as he returned to the conference room. I
was nearly an hour in writing the dispatch. Several times Stalin
peeked in, and inquired whether we were comfortable and had
everything we needed.

I interrupted myself only once, to telephone Billy.

“Where are you, dear?” she asked. “Have you forgotten that
we have a party tonight? The whole gang will be here.”

“I hope you will forgive me,” I teased her. “You see, I am
very busy at the moment, and may be tied up another hour or
two.”

“But where are you?”

“Oh, in Stalin’s office . . . just had a chat with him and with
Voroshilov.”

“Stop your kidding! Where are you?”

“No joke, in Stalin’s office. All right, you don’t have to believe
it. Tell you all about it when I get home.”

Voroshilov was still with Stalin when I took in the type-
written sheets. Both leaders smiled as the dispatch was trans-
lated, particularly at my detailed description of Stalin’s looks and
manner, Voroshilov’s boyish exuberance and the references to
Stalin’s family. Four or five times Stalin interjected minor cor-
rections and suggestions, none of them of a political character.
That finished, I said:

“Would you be good enough to sign this copy for me? It may
simplify matters in getting the story by the censors. You know,
there is a censorship on news here.”

He wrote: “ More or less correct , J. Stalin .” That autographed
copy is still in my possession.

Then I wrote a few words of thanks for his patience on one
of the carbon copies, signed it, and left it with him.

39 °

DOUBT

3

The unthinkable interview was over. The two minutes had
stretched to nearly two hours. As we left the building and hailed
a droshky, I said to Charlie:

“I like that man!”

Charlie agreed, but in a lower emotional key. A little more
analytical than I, and less involved in the sheer thrill of the
newspaper scoop, he discounted much of Stalin’s personal charm.
Warm hospitality is a racial characteristic of the Georgians. Per-
haps he could recognize more of the hardness under the charm
than I did, in my mood of gratitude for this gift of the first inter-
view.

But in the years that followed, with ample time to reassay my
impressions, I did not change my mind about my essential re-
action to Stalin’s personality. Even at moments when the behavior
of his regime seemed to me most hateful, I retained that liking
for Stalin as a human being. I could understand thereafter the
devotion to the man held by certain writers of my acquaintance
who had come to know him personally. There was little in com-
mon between the infallible deified Stalin fostered as a political
myth and the Stalin I had met. In the simplicity which impressed
me more than any other element in his make-up, there was noth-
ing of make-believe, nowhere a note of falseness or affectation.
His friendliness was not the back-slapping good-fellow type of
the politician, but something innate, something that rang true.
In his unpretentiousness there was nothing pretentious.

Subsequently another American correspondent was received by
Stalin. We compared notes, and it was as if we had met totally
different men, our impressions were so completely at variance.
He carried away the imprint of a ruthless, steel-armored per-
sonality, with few of those human attributes which I had seen
to relieve its harshness: a picture more consistent with Stalin’s pub-
lic character. For years I wondered which of us was closer to
the truth, or whether there were two truths. Then I read the
autobiography of H. G. Wells, where he gives a vivid word pic-
ture of his interview with Stalin. His reactions to the man were
so close to my own that he used almost the same words to con-

AN INTERVIEW WITH STALIN 391

vey his impression of Stalin’s essential humanness and simplicity.
It was reassuring to know that if I was wrong, I had eminent
company in my error.

I sought out the censor, Podolsky, in his home and handed
him the dispatch. He collapsed into a chair, literally, with the
Russian equivalent of “Pll be damned!”

When I reached home, the party guests had arrived, practically
all the American correspondents among them.

“Well, a nice host you are!” one of them exclaimed. “Inviting
a lot of people and then walking out on them.”

“Yes, where have you been?” another said. “Scooping us all,
I suppose.”

“Well, where do you suppose Pve been?” I answered, as non-
chalantly as I could manage. “With Comrade Stalin, of course!”

That didn’t even evoke a laugh. The joke was worn too thin
to be funny. No one guessed that I was telling them a literal
truth. But I was too full of the excitement to bottle it up in-
definitely. Before the evening was over, I convinced them that it
was no wisecrack, and the congratulations were tinged with chagrin.

The interview was “kept on the ice” by the New York office
for Monday morning, when it would get a better break, journalisti-
cally speaking. It was front-paged throughout the world, quoted,
editorialized, put on the radio by the “March of Time” as one
of the ranking “scoops” in recent newspaper history. My descrip-
tion of Stalin as a likeable human being seemed to touch the
world’s imagination. “Congratulations to the United Press,” said
an editorial in the New York Daily News y “on the most distin-
guished piece of reporting of this year, if not of the last four
or five years.”

The flood of rumor from neighboring capitals was stemmed.
An amusing commentary on the Riga news mentality came to my
knowledge. Donald Day, one of the Riga veterans, in a letter to
Junius B. Wood of the Chicago Daily News , inquired confiden-
tially whether Gene Lyons had really obtained that personal inter-
view or had it all been imaginary!

In the next days I was deluged with congratulatory telegrams
from all over the world — from editors, foreign correspondents, ac-
quaintances. Outwardly I preened myself on the achievement
(though 9J% of it was luck) and took all the laurels without

DOUBT

392

demur. But only Billy, Charlie, and one or two other intimates
knew that inwardly I was far from exultant.

I thought of all the searching questions which I might have
asked but had been too idiotic and too timid and too grateful to
ask and I was overwhelmed with a conviction of failure. I had
failed to confront Stalin with the problems which were by this
time weighing on my own conscience the use of terror as a tech-
nique of government, the suppression and punishment of heretical
opinion within the ranks of devoted communists, the persecution
of scientists and scholars, the distortion of history to fit new policies,
systematic forced labor, the virtual enslavement of workers and
peasants in the name of the socialism which was to emancipate
them. In my purely professional thrill of a Stalin interview, I
had been content to remain politely on the lacquered statistical
surface of the Soviet scene. I had accepted the glib assumptions
of the monolithic Party as the unquestioned basis for an inter-
view.

It would have been not merely more enterprising but more
honest to probe deeper, to question less politely. I must have left
an impression with both Stalin and Voroshilov that I was closer
to them in my views of Soviet life than I was in actuality. For
this I was to reproach myself often in years to come.

Amidst the telegrams and letters and the jubilation of my em-
ployers, I was depressed by the feeling of a magnificent oppor-
tunity frittered away.

XII. American Interlude

WE WENT to America, on vacation, by way of Berlin and Rome:
Berlin to say good-by to Genie, who was remaining at school, and
Rome in the hope of interviewing II Duce . The Italian dictator, it
is true, was being scalped by newspaper braves too often to count
as in itself an achievement, but Mussolini’s scalp, by the side of
Stalin’s, would have made a unique display for any warrior.

I was fairly familiar with Berlin, having visited it two or three
times a year, and was trying to keep myself posted on the crucial
struggle for survival being made by the Republic against the
combined assaults of Nazis and communists. Our arrival at the
Adlon bar, unofficial headquarters of the American press corps,
had become a sort of homecoming. Even little Genie climbed the
high stool for a lemonade and potato chips, and was greeted by
Fred, the bartender, like an old and highly valued customer.
Her command of the German language in those few months made
her parents feel like the hen in the fable as the duckling paddled
off on the lake. We had arranged for her to spend week-ends
with a Soviet family in Berlin to keep up her Russian as well.

A batch of correspondents was usually on hand at the Adlon,
exchanging casual bits of information about world events while
rolling the poker dice with toothpicks for chips. I had been there
during Christmas week two months earlier, feeling less of an out-
sider than usual because of the trailing clouds of glory from the
Stalin scoop. Moscow was, after all, my first foreign assignment
and in the midst of these veterans of a dozen news centers I was
conscious of being a mere tyro.

Before the war foreign news had been largely a matter of per-
sonalities and spectacles: the rise and fall of politicians and rulers,
the doings — and even more so the misdoings — of royal personages,
etc. Since the war foreign news had become an ever more intricate
business calling for some understanding of history and economic
forces 5 classes had in large measure taken the place of individ-

393

DOUBT

394

uals as protagonists in the great show. While not essential for
holding an important post and even for acquiring an international
reputation, brains no longer in themselves disqualified a man for
a correspondent’s job.

“Are you a correspondent?” we liked to say to newcomers 5
“well, I’m a prostitute too.” We made it a point to be casual and
nonchalant about kings and dictators and premiers. But our non-
chalance was only skin-deep. Underneath it we were thoroughly
impressed with the importance of our calling and our privileged
vantage point on History in the Making. The bibulous school of
foreign journalism was already in decline — even old-timers rec-
ognized grudgingly that a teetotaler might make a pretty good
correspondent notwithstanding. Foregathering at bars was largely
a salute to tradition.

The tragic events which were soon to overwhelm Germany
gave special depth to a conversation with a German communist
in Berlin. I had met him long before, in New York. I knew
that he had been in Moscow several times in recent years.

“Yes, I’ve been to Moscow,” he said, a little apologetically.
“I didn’t look you up. ... You know how these things are.
. . . It’s all a mess, Gene. I can’t face the German workers any
longer and tell them that everything is lovely in the socialist
fatherland. Too many of them know the truth and think me a
liar.”

He had not yet brought himself to the point of speaking out,
except as now in private. Some months later he did — or perhaps
his private views were carried to headquarters — and he was duly
expelled from the Party.

“But look at the tremendous vote the Party rolled up in the
German election,” I consoled him.

“It’s meaningless. The Hitler movement is growing just as fast,
and the strategic advantages are all on their side. The worst of
it is that every communist vote is also a potential Nazi vote, be-
cause we have failed to attack fascist methods and the fascist men-
tality. And we can’t do that without coming out at the same time
against similar methods and a similar mentality in Moscow. We’re
just a sect, with our faces to Mecca in the Kremlin. Either they
don’t understand it in Moscow or don’t care; the effects are the

AMERICAN INTERLUDE 395

same In any case. Anyone who tries to tell them is kicked out of
the Party. Our German leadership has become a stupid megaphone
for Moscow, more interested in remaining in the good graces of
Stalin than in steering away from disaster at home.”

“Yet, you have the Rot Front and a fighting spirit. Every in-
tellectual one meets here seems to be a communist or almost a
communist.”

“Pm not minimizing our strength,” he said, “but the real
danger is in over-estimating it. Too much of that fighting spirit
is directed against the wrong people. The moment is critical but
we are spending most of our energy hammering down the Re-
public for our enemies. Many of these intellectuals you talk
about are fascists at heart. They’ll step over the line at a "mo-
ment’s notice. They hate this blundering Republic and we are
giving them a ‘decent’ and high-minded excuse for hating de-
mocracy.”

The so-called “united front from below,” that is to say, over
the heads of more conservative leaders and organizations, had by
that time created in Germany, as elsewhere, the soporific illusion
of communist strength. There were innumerable societies and
leagues and unions presumably of a popular kind — but all of
them different names for the self-same coterie of sectarian leaders.
It made a fine show in reports to Moscow headquarters and a
loud noise in the communist press but it was (as events demon-
strated) a childish delusion.

From Berlin we went to Rome. Italian friends made in San
Remo the previous summer and Italian newspapermen whom we
had met in Moscow conducted us through nurseries, museums,
model tenements. They assured us that the people were accepting
enthusiastically the immediate sacrifices and ruthless disciplines
for the sake of the glorious future, that Italy was a backward
peasant country in hostile surroundings, and that great national
revolutions like theirs could not be made with silk gloves. It
was all so familiar, the litany of monolithic dictatorship. I talked
with certain American correspondents dear to Mussolini’s heart:
“friendly” and “loyal” correspondents who were appreciative of
Latin hospitality and broad-mindedly accepted hardships and ter-
ror for other people in the name of the long view; after all, they

DOUBT

39 6

$aid> trains were running on schedule and the Italians were really
unfit to govern themselves.

At the Press Department, an Italian version of Mr. Arens, with
the same secret-service aroma about him, explained that the fascist
regime did not censor the foreign reporters. His department was
there “to help the correspondents and to shield them against the
falsehoods spread by counterrevolutionary elements.” But look
how some of them paid with insult for all this solicitude! And
he complained against some statements made by Webb Miller,
another U.P. man.

Nevertheless, he would inquire about my interview with II
Dace. Having small hope that the inquiry would do any good,
I booked passage on the Augustas , sailing from Naples in a few
days. Then, to my surprise, I was notified that Mussolini would
be away from Rome for a week or ten days in connection with
some international conference, but would probably agree to re-
ceive me on his return. The probability, however, did not seem
strong enough to be worth weeks of waiting and I decided to
sail.

Beneath the professional excuse for the Rome visit was my
long-cherished personal hope of showing the city to Billy. Ever
since the gloomy day exactly ten years earlier, when a paternal
cotnmissario had quoted his Sicilian adage and advised me to come
back with the girl whose picture he found in my pocket, I had
played with that idea. Now I took Billy to the spots where Nor-
man Matson and I had dreamed and schemed and exulted over
the bright new world being born in Russia. I showed her the
Danish pension where we had lived and the cafes where we had
loitered. One golden afternoon we drove out in a hansom cab
to the catacombs 5 stopping at a roadside trattoria for lunch, we
were served by the fadrone and his family with a two-hour meal
and special vintages and flowers — one of those meals that stand
out like monuments in one’s gastronomic history.

Naples, for all its exotic flavor, was a disappointment. It did
not measure up to my ten-year-old memory 3 the very burros and
streets of flowers and ragged street boys had lost their grand-
opera color and swagger. The change, alas, was not in Naples
but in me 3 I had been only twenty-two then and about to become
the John Reed of the Italian Revolution. . . .

AMERICAN INTERLUDE

397

2

My head was still haloed in the radiance of that Stalin inter-
view when I reached New York in March, 1931. A fast-fading
radiance and a tarnished halo, but United Press publicity burnished
my reputation with vigorous strokes for display purposes. It was
as good as new by the time the ships news reporters boarded the
Augustus off quarantine in New York harbor. What small hope
I nurtured of going into cozy vacation privacy somewhere, to
assess what I had experienced in three full years under the Soviets
— or at least to avoid the need for making such an assessment in
public — was shattered by young Manley, secretary to President
Bickel. He came aboard with the reporters and informed me casu-
ally that I was booked for radio talks, dinner speeches, inter-
views, and a lecture tour.

My repolished fame, such as it was, was catapulting me into
the public light, and a consistent attitude to the Russian revolu-
tion, a working hypothesis, was essential. I needed urgently a
fairly rigid framework of assumptions and principles within which
I could organize the multitudinous facts and impressions, other-
wise they would be as hopeless a jumble of contradictions as life
itself. The reporter or the historian, however sincerely he may
pride himself on his cold objectivity, is in the final analysis a
creative artist, sorting, rejecting, arranging the data of his ex-
perience into a sensible pattern. The whole experience of one man
in one day cannot be condensed into one large volume, as James
Joyce has demonstrated in Ulysses ; how then condense the ex-
perience of a great nation over a period of years?

Reporting is a highly selective process, usually carried on far
below the surface of the conscious mind, by a man’s deepest in-
stincts, his faith and prejudices and eager hopes. Only those who
are most completely subject to this law deny its existence 5 their
inner censors are so well concealed, their prejudices so well oiled,
that the process seems automatic and their creative, purposeful
shaping of the stuff of life into a public image of their private
soul seems a triumph of “objectivity.” It is when the inner cen-
sors, sifting the daily grist of experience, begin to quarrel among
themselves that the trouble begins.

398 DOUBT

In the first year or so of my Russian sojourn, my imported
convictions were a sieve that sifted events for me; reporting was
no more than a physical job of finding and transmitting “desirable”
information; I needed only a little dexterity in wishing away or
explaining away the rejected materials. Later, when doubts ob-
truded themselves and my instincts were more and more hurt,
the sifting became a conscious mental effort, paid for in self-
reproach. The anxiety to “belong” in the dominant social circles
in Bolshevik Moscow, the fear of being rejected by the only circles
that mattered to me at home, played their roles in keeping me
“friendly.” But beyond that, far more effective, were the buga-
boos of loyalty and consistency, the need to safeguard my faith:
a frantic desire to save my investment of hope and enthusiasm in
the Russian revolution.

All the way across Europe and the Atlantic, I wrestled with
the problem of how much of what I had seen and what I had
thought I should tell. Before leaving Moscow I wrote a series
of articles summarizing my three Russian years. I found, on re-
turning, that it had been played up wherever the United Press
had clients, which means every city and town of any consequence
in the country, with the usual ballyhoo. The Truth About Russia
in foot-high letters on newspaper delivery trucks (I saw photo-
graphs of them) made me feel like an impostor. The “truth” in-
deed, when I was so far from having evolved a workable truth for
myself, let alone others. The “truth” indeed, when I knew every
paragraph to be a labored formula of compromise between loom-
ing doubts and waning loyalties, complicated (even if I did not
admit this to myself) by the wish to hold my job and return to
Moscow on the comfortable old footing of a “friendly” corre-
spondent.

One visit to my old office, the Tass bureau, wiped out any
lingering misapprehensions as to the attitude of former comrades;
the atmosphere was wintry and the Tass employees pitifully em-
barrassed — even poor Bessie, the office stenographer, could not
make up her mind whether shaking hands with me was sinful,
and stood poised uncertainly as though waiting for a Party de-
cision on the problem. But it no longer seemed so important
to me whether I would be labeled as a renegade by former com-

AMERICAN INTERLUDE 399

rades. Against what I had witnessed in Russia that consideration
seemed fantastically petty.

In the end, my old inhibitions, the inner compulsion to save
face for the revolution, won out in my mind. In private con-
versation I let off plenty of steam, especially when I was talking
to near-communists. Most of Russia’s worst troubles, I said, could
be traced directly to its frantic misuse of the weapon of terror.
But in public, on the lecture platform or before the radio “mike,”
I uttered none of these things.

I had returned to an America of depression and millions of un-
employed, in which the ruling classes still boasted of their rugged
individualism. For millions, the epic of Russia, where unemploy-
ment had been liquidated, spelled hope. Russia’s slogans of national
planning were penetrating even to capitalist economists. I took the
easiest, the pleasantest, and, it seemed to me, also the most “de-
cent” and “loyal” course of sustaining those hopes. The general
public, where it knew me at all, regarded me as a supporter of
the Soviets. A super-patriotic society with headquarters in Chicago
sent advance notices to the communities where I was to appear,
warning them that I was a Bolshevik propagandist in respectable
reporter’s clothing.

My audiences were for the most part businessmen, in their
luncheon clubs, Chambers of Commerce, and Rotary Clubs. This
simplified matters for me. This was only 1931 and the depres-
sion had not yet erased the smugness from their expressions. In
the official economic weather forecasts, prosperity was still around
the corner. Looking into their self-satisfied faces, I could forget my
doubts. I wanted only to make these men squirm, to pay them
off for the unemployment and the distress they were accepting
so placidly, to throw a monkey-wrench into the machinery of
their automatic thinking.

“You gentlemen,” I liked to say, looking some especially over-
stuffed specimen in the eye, “are men of influence in your com-
munity by virtue of your business and your money. But if you
were to arrive in the Soviet Union, you would realize quickly
enough that you had better not boast about your possessions.

“Your money would make you an outcast, little better than a
criminal. Only your American passports would save you from
being liquidated as social leeches. Any schoolboy would explain

DOUBT

400

that you acquired your wealth by robbing and exploiting your
fellow-men. He would tell you that you are a parasite living
on the sweat of the workers and that a concentration camp was
too good for such a public enemy.”

If the overstuffed gentleman thus pinned down began to squirm
and grow purple under the gills, I would blandly add:

“I am merely trying to explain to you the Bolshevik point of
view, for which, of course, I am not personally responsible.”

My lectures took me through about twenty cities in the north-
eastern section of the country. The first of them, in Youngstown,
Ohio, was the most difficult. Instead of an intimate luncheon group
such as I had visualized, I found myself on a vast throne-chair
on a vaster stage in the largest auditorium in the city crowded
to capacity. The local communists had turned out in full force
as well as the city officials and Chamber of Commerce elements.
I felt small, helpless, trapped, as I stared from the edge of my
throne-chair into the crowded gallery and the field of faces stretch-
ing (or so it seemed to me) to a far horizon. It was a cold, rainy
Sunday afternoon, but sweat crawled down my collar.

But after a few blundering minutes, the fear fell away miracu-
lously, and I was spinning along with a fluency which the audience
accepted as a matter of course, but which astonished the lecturer.
I lost my place in the prepared notes and never found it again,
but I had no need of guidance. I was speaking to the simple,
hopeful men and women in that audience rather than the city
fathers and big businessmen. I spoke of the hardships and sacrifices
imposed by the Five Year Plan and the rigid discipline enforced
upon the whole population, but I made these things look small in
comparison with the great achievements and the greater promises.
Sometimes I touched upon sore points in my own mind, such as
the hounding of intellectuals and the liquidation of kulaks, and
the hidden resentments came to the surface. I drove them back
to their subterranean lairs. The vociferous applause of the Left
Wing in the audience (massed for organized heckling should the
need arise) continually interrupted my talk and indicates sufficiently
the drift of my story.

My abandoned notes, had they guessed it, did not merit com-
munist applause. I had intended to paint a much more realistic
picture. But the simple believing people, their eyes pleading for

AMERICAN INTERLUDE 40 I

reassurance like the eyes of famished creatures begging for food,
could not be denied. And always, in this tour, I spoke more en-
thusiastically than I felt.

At a luncheon meeting of the Women’s Press Club, in Washing-
ton, I discovered that I was ensconced in the very midst of an array
of officers of the D.A.R. The organization, it happened, was hold-
ing its annual convention and the club invited the officers to be
present. They were precisely the sort of women, so safe and snug
in their congealed heritage, who set my mental teeth on edge. My
talk, in consequence, took a more militantly pro-Soviet line than
ever. For too many of these women the American Revolution
was a fossilized thing in their private little museum. I knew
that often an illiterate immigrant, come here to seek freedom,
possessed more of the American Revolution than many a sancti-
fied Son and Daughter. In the question period, one of the D.A.R.
ladies asked about the attitude of Russian women.

“A hundred and fifty years from now,” I said, “there will
probably be an organization known as the Daughters of the Rus-
sian Revolution who, despite their name, will be reactionary and
intolerant. But as yet the revolutionary women of Russia are truly
revolutionists,” and on in this vein.

This, my first speaking tour, left as residue in my mind a con-
viction of the futility of lecturing. In all, perhaps ten thousand
people gave up two hours of their time for “the truth at last
about Russia” in pill form. They heard a nervous young man boil
down three years of intense mental and emotional adventure into
a fistful of rough-grained facts only vaguely related to his larger
experience. Because they wanted to know only whether it was
“good” or “bad,” a “success” or a “failure” — large, meaningless
words unrelated to the essence of the revolution — he assured them
that it was good and successful.

3

I found in the radical rrnlieu of New York the self-same delusion
of communist strength as in Berlin. Though on a smaller scale
than in Germany, its make-believe was more intensive. American
communists were lost in a maze of self-deception. In Europe,
where communism was a mass movement, the self-styled “united

DOUBT

402

front” organizations at least had working men and women in their
membership. In the United States, it all seemed to me a house of
sand, built by middle-class intellectuals whom the depression had
driven out of their accustomed burrows. Well-meaning clergy-
men, social workers, writers, dentists, pacifists, Negro religious
maniacs lured into Leagues-for-This and Bureaus-for-That: an
elaborate false front and respectable window dressing for a struc-
ture that did not exist.

Communist majorities in America had been expelled at Mos-
cow’s behest, so that the minorities became majorities until the
next split; thinking had been replaced by slogans changed, on
occasion, overnight; and a new jargon for initiates was evolved,
full of deviations, plenums, theses, social fascists, fronts, and
orders. A talent for machiavellian intrigue and foul language had
become the mark of the “Third Period” mock-revolutionary, and
a horde of middle-class ladies and gentlemen with a taste for the
bogus melodrama of revolution were amusing themselves with
passwords, countersigns, cells, Party lines, ideological hair-split-
ting, and proletarian pig-Latin.

America was fertile ground for such extravagant self-deception.
The depression had transposed to a sociological key the same je-
june thrills they or their fathers had formerly found in the Fra-
ternal Order of Sanctified Buffaloes, or its equivalent, the same
soul-warming discipline of obedience to orders (“Party directives”
they were now called) from the Sacred Fount of the Omnipotent
Poo-Bah, now in Moscow instead of Baltimore or Cincinnati. This
proletarian Mumbo-Jumbo — the psychological equivalent of the
Ku Klux Klan in its blind obedience, its enthusiastic renunciation
of logic, its rites and fetishes — did not extend far beyond limited
circles in New York, Chicago, and a few other cities. But there it
was fast becoming fashionable: already the proletarian brotherhood
counted a good many millionaires’ sons, professors, successful
authors, and influential critics.

The writers and critics in particular, since the whole movement
was on an imaginative level divorced from low-down realities,
were succeeding in setting the tone for the more advanced intel-
lectual circles; whilom liberal magazines put on nice new totali-
tarian blinkers; literary columnists wrote with one eye on Mrs.
Reid or Mr. Ochs and the other on the New Masses. “Innocents’

AMERICAN INTERLUDE

403

Clubs” — different names for the same group of communists, but
trimmed with “respectables” from churches, colleges, social settle-
ments, etc. — grew apace and on special occasions, such as May Day,
forged united fronts with themselves.

Such was the communist movement in America in 1931: a
middle-class sect of heresy-hunters encased in a fungus growth of
proletarian voodoo. No more than a mild beginning, it was, of the
luxuriant lunacies still to come, as the deepening economic de-
pression made believing more attractive than thinking.

4

My friend Boris Pilnyak, the novelist, had preceded me to the
United States by a few days. Ray Long, editor of Cosmopolitan
Magazine, had arranged a reception banquet for him at the Metro-
politan Club and had radioed me to get off and push the S.S.
Augustus because he had already postponed the reception once to
enable me to share the honors. I pushed and we landed just in
time.

The post-prandial amenities of that banquet were interrupted
by the slap heard round the world, with Sinclair Lewis at the
receiving end and Theodore Dreiser administering. Hostilities
were opened in the after-dinner speeches, when “Red” Lewis bal-
anced his warm welcome to a fellow-novelist from the Soviet land
with an even warmer insult to a fellow-novelist in his own land.
Whatever the newly-crowned Nobel Prize winner may have
thought of communism in general, he made it clear that he ob-
jected to literary expropriation before the revolution. The com-
pany included the cream of American popular literature and a
nice pink sauce of Soviet sympathizers. The atmosphere was elec-
tric, and Ray Long, being a Bismarck among toastmasters, imme-
diately called on Irvin Cobb to divert the lightning. The humorist
faced the Soviet guest and spoke in the following sense:

“Mr. Pilnyak, all of us here can welcome you with a most
genuine cordiality, for the simple reason that few of us know
you. As soon as America recognizes your talents and you become
a real competitor, the cordiality will ebb and you, too, will be
subject to attack. One of the risks of the trade, you know.”

The lightning was stayed. But later, when most of the guests

404 DOUBT

had gone, Lewis and Dreiser in their social peregrinations met in
one of the smaller rooms off the dining room, and a few hot
words on Lewis’ part drew the celebrated slap. I was told of it
the next morning, with the injunction to keep the matter quiet j
all those who were eyewitnesses to the affair had agreed to squelch
the trivial incident in silence. But there is always one leak in every
conspiracy, otherwise newspapers would close down shop. The
whole story was on the front page of the New York Post by noon
and girdling the globe a few minutes later.

Thus a slap overshadowed what was in itself a noteworthy gath-
ering. The consummate showmanship of Ray Long was the chief
explanation for the fact that about a score of leading literary men
in America turned out to greet a Soviet writer. The eminent
authors and editors, with few if any exceptions, knew exactly
nothing about post-revolutionary Russian letters, and Boris Pil-
nyak was just so many outlandish syllables to them. But for
Americans anything from the U.S.S.R. was now charged with
curiosity and a good deal of awe as well. What was ostensibly a
testimonial to Soviet literature was in reality a testimonial to the
Five Year Plan.

Ray Long had visited Russia early in November to “buy up”
literary material for his magazine and for the Hearst book pub-
lishing organization. Few men in the history of American pub-
lishing had a keener nose for the trail of literary merchandise or
greater persistence in stalking their quarry; with Hearst money
for ammunition, the hunt in Europe was not too difficult. But he
found quickly enough that the Soviet Union was a new kind of
hunting ground and Soviet authors a new kind of animal. After
two weeks of negotiations with VOKS, RAPP, and other alpha-
betical mysteries, he was so completely lost in the jungles of official
red tape that he was ready to give up the chase.

Being somewhat more familiar with that jungle, I was able to
come to his aid. One by one, I invited those writers whose stories
might conceivably fit into his plans to my office and direct arrange-
ments were made for about half a dozen Soviet short stories to
go into Cosmopolitan and several books to be published, Charles
Malamuth doing the translating. The first Soviet fiction to appear
in any popular national magazine in America can thus be traced
to Petrovsky Pereulok, as well as books like Pilnyak’s The Volga

AMERICAN INTERLUDE 405

Flows into the Caspian Sea , Valentine Katayev’s Time Forward,
and Little Golden Calf by Ilf and Petrov. (The publication of
the remarkable melodrama, Chocolate, by Tarasov-Rodionov,*
I arranged with Doubleday-Doran while 1 was in America.)

Billy and I had accompanied Long to Leningrad, ostensibly to
meet certain writers in that city, but actually because the editor
was eager to meet the eighty-five-year-old mother .of his friend
the portrait painter, Leon Gordon. Among those who came to the
Hotel Europe was Alexei Tolstoy. Tentative terms were discussed
for the publication of his works. Everything having been agreed
upon, Tolstoy pulled a solemn face.

“Only one other condition I must make,” he said, “without
which our entire negotiations will collapse.”

“What is it?” Long asked, alarmed.

“You must agree to send me a pound or two of good European
or American tobacco for my pipe.”

Long kept that part of the bargain, although the books were
never published.

More memorable by far than the literary conferences was the
meeting between the aged Mrs. Gordon and the American editor.
Watching the scene, Billy and I could understand what had made
him so successful in the popular magazine field. The sentimentality
of the fiction on which he built the immense circulation of Cosmo-
politan was no accident or affectation; it was in the editor’s own
heart. No old-mother scene in the pages of his magazine could
match the one we witnessed in that overcrowded Leningrad flat.
Without a word in common in any language, Long and Mrs. Gor-
don understood one another instantly, expressing their affection
in embraces and tears. For Long she was not only the beautiful
gray-haired mother of his gifted friend Leon — she was all the
mothers in the world, all the mothers who had wept and suffered
for the edification of Cosmopolitans millionfold public, rolled into
one. Leon’s brother, Hilary Gordon, a Soviet engineer, celebrated
the occasion in true Russian style by challenging his American
guest to a contest in vodka drinking. It may be recorded for the
glory of the Red, White and Blue that America won out in this
contest, but not without casualties. At the ballet that evening — •

* Arrested in 1936.

406 doubt

Swan Lake, with the great Semionova dancing— Ray insisted aloud
that “these are not swans but girls and no one can tell me differ-
ent; if those lovely legs are swans’ legs, I’m. an Indian.” In which
his neighbors in a radius ten rows around would unquestionably
have concurred had they understood English ; as it was, we had
to leave the theater all too suddenly.

And so Ray Long, of all the unlikely people imaginable, now
stood sponsor for Soviet letters in the United States. Here he was,
Pilnyak to the right and a Moscow correspondent to the left,
launching Bolshevik literature on this side of the Atlantic with
champagne and beer in the presence of the shock troopers of
American literature. The occasion ranks in my mind with Mr.
Ot ting er’s invocation to God to help carry through the Five Year
Plan for atheist Russia as an example of American naivete in
relation to all things Soviet.

5

With this literary banquet as a starter, my education in the
new Am erican attitudes toward the Great Experiment in Russia
proceeded apace. A day or two later, as though for my particular
e difica tion, an excellent display of middle-class pro-Soviet enthu-
siasts was gathered at Town Hall. The exhibit styled itself a “We-
Have-Been-to-the-U.S.S.R. Dinner” and contained first-rate speci-
mens of practically every variety of eulogist, from the simple third-
category tourist through the high-powered salesman with a fat
Soviet contract in view. The pep-it-up booster spirit, that moves
moun tains and sells real estate, prevailed, and indiscriminate en-
thusiasm for everything Soviet gushed and popped and crackled.

“Down with us!” would have been the appropriate slogan for
the dinner, since a large majority of the guests, had they been
Russians, would have been crushed long ago in one or another
purge. Liberal intellectuals with kind hearts and fuzzy minds: ex-
actly the breed which was just then being liquidated wholesale in
their “spiritual fatherland.” A few of those at the speakers’ table,
indeed, would have been liquidated on their looks alone, they
were such clear-cut bourgeois types.

Several score ladies and gentlemen who had made the pilgrim-
age, most of them as ordinary customers of Intourist but some as

AMERICAN INTERLUDE 407

members of formal delegations, fortified themselves with a large
dinner, and proceeded to pile up superlatives. Could it be the
same Russia which I left a few weeks earlier that they were ex-
claiming over in such childish delight? Did this gray-haired little
lady from some college really approve the works of Comrades
Menzhinsky and Yagoda of the G.P.U.? Did this cheerful Ro-
tarian defender of civil liberties actually believe that Russia was
the “freest country in the world” and the home of “red democ-
racy”? And the bald-headed little clergyman with spectacles on
the tip of his nose, why was he of all people so thrilled with the
Five Year Plan for the Liquidation of God?

Had the fabled visitor from Mars stumbled upon this little
party, he would have carried back an account of a curious country
called the U.S.S.R., devoted largely to lovely day nurseries, free
abortions, new architecture, and teaching peasants to read} a coun-
try in which everyone at last was free and equal and supremely
happy} a country in which men and women danced at their work.
The Soviet officials present must have blushed for the monu-
mental simplicity of these Americans. These, mind you, were not
ruthless Bolsheviks wielding their “sword of history,” let the
heads fall where they may, but effervescent outsiders who mis-
took the heads for croquet balls. The hardships and sacrifices which
they mentioned in passing seemed, in their speeches, merely to
add a fillip of excitement to the thrilling Russian game.

A gathering of class-conscious boorzhooys was a relief after
Town Hall. About fifty important industrialists and editors con-
gregated around a banquet board at the Lotos Club as guests of
the United Press, with myself and the Rome correspondent, Tom
Morgan, as the attractions. They, too, were untouched by the
woes of the Russian population, but for the logical reason that
they really did not care. The indifference of the Lotos Club was
not, as in Town Hall, obscene.

A microphone was brought to the table and for fifteen minutes
I read into it on a coast-to-coast broadcast. The subject I had
chosen was Stalin. My pleasant impression of the man in personal
contact was still fresh in my mind and the talk was consequently
in a key of appreciative analysis of his character. The Lotos Club
setting underlined my perverse impulse to shock the capitalists
and millionaires around me, and the consciousness of a nation-

408 doubt

wide audience underscored my decision to save face for the revo-
lution. In my peroration, therefore, I drew a parallel between
Stalin and Abraham Lincoln— the same humble origin, the same
readiness to make costly decisions in the interest of their social
faith, etc. The comparison was far-fetched and I am not too proud
of it. A number of professional patriots were scandalized, perhaps
not unjustly, and protested against the blasphemy in vigorous lan-
guage in the course of the next few days. Certain communists, on
the other hand, professed to be no less scandalized. “Why must
you drag Stalin down to Lincoln’s level?” one of them complained.

It was the first broadcasting experience in my life and I was
r unn ing with the sweat of honest stage-fright when it was over,
though Mr. Aylesworth, then President of N.B.C., who was among
the guests, was generous enough to compliment me on the deliv-
ery when we met socially in the lavatory later that evening.

After the lecture tour, I went to Washington to meet Mr.
Stimson, the Secretary of State. President Bickel sat in on the
interview. I found the Secretary an extremely likeable and genial
person, but I emerged from the half hour’s conference without
having said very much, good or ill, about the Soviet Union. Os-
tensibly, I was in the capital to give Mr. Stimson the benefit of
my Russian experience, but he was so brimful of opinions on
Russia and communism that I could scarcely get a sentence in
edgewise.

The American people, he told me in effect, are individualists,
every one of them. There is not the slightest chance, therefore, of
socialistic notions being accepted or tolerated here. We have been
raised and prospered as a nation upon free competition and any
political philosophy which means regimentation has no chance here.
And more in this strain.

Senator Borah, when I dropped in on him in the company of
red-headed Bob Allen, was sitting at his ease, feet on desk, reading
a booklet. It was a reprint of my own series of articles — so perhaps
my arrival was not as unexpected as it seemed. In any case, the
Senator was good enough to tell me a great deal about Russia
without urging. In fact, wherever I went people were ready to
give me the low-down on Russia. It was the one subject on which
everyone had definite and usually exclamatory views, ranging from

AMERICAN INTERLUDE 409

pop-eyed detestation of the whole business to pop-eyed admiration.
Usually, it was hated and admired for the wrong things.

This intense, passionate interest in Russia, strange and ludicrous
as its manifestations may have been on occasion, was the most sig-
nificant single impression I carried back to Moscow from my
American visit. The Soviet experiment at this stage, coinciding
with the economic depression in the non-Soviet world, was a chal-
lenge to all the old certainties. Whatever the ultimate fate of
communist ideas in Russia itself, they were entering the stream
of human thought, a yeast and a ferment.

Back in Berlin, I was kept waiting nearly a week for a Soviet
visa, though normally I received it within an hour or two. For
all my restraint in public speeches and interviews, reports of
heretical statements on my part must have been relayed to Mos-
cow 3 very likely my less guarded remarks in private conversation
had been reported. When the visa was finally issued, no ex-
planation of the delay was provided. But some months later, War
Commissar Voroshilov told me smilingly that there had been
distressing reports to the effect that I had “scolded” them, re-
ports which on investigation proved exaggerated.

BOOK 4

DISILLUSIONMENT

I. “Socialism” Revised

THE Five Year Plan in Four Years — 2 + 2 = 5. On Soviet
Square a huge map rashed with dots, stars, crosses, to mark pro-
jected industrial developments. A giant scoreboard: Over There:
unemployment, strikes, fascism, etc., and Over Here: new fac-
tories, shock brigades, unemployment liquidated, Dnieprostroi, etc.
On billboards, livid zigzag lightning (G.P.U.) strikes gorilla-like
villain head — “Death to Wreckers!”. In a filthy restaurant, paper
flowers in flowerpots are thick with dust, on plates the legend,
“Through public feeding to socialism,” and prices for playwrights
and embezzlers only. On billboards, also, rabbits now multiply:
through rabbit cutlets to socialism: 2 + 2 = 5. On every street,
kerosene queues and bread queues and tramcar queues. Viscous
ooze of swarming dung-colored people, not ugly but incredibly
soiled, patched, drab; the odor and color of ingrained poverty,
fetid bundles, stale clothes. Spring mud squelches slippery under-
foot. Tramcars tight-packed with humanity, squirting heads, legs,
arms. The familiar stink in vestibules where your documents are
inspected and grimy men issue prcypu-sks — permits. At the doors
of public and near-public buildings, mills, bakeries, everywhere —
soldiers with fixed bayonets. At every pile of brick or rubble, a
decrepit old watchman in sheepskin or cast-off military greatcoat,
armed with a decrepit old rifle — futile symbol of protection. Pri-
vate doors are completely locked and barred 3 they open suspi-
ciously only after complicated bell signals. The poverty every-
where carefully protected against marauders; a desperate emphasis
on private possessions that flows from poverty, every scrap and
tag-end in the garbage heap anxiously guarded amidst the social-
ized slogans.

A few “commercial” shops have appeared on the main streets,
resplendent with ivory pillars of butter, festive chains of sausage,
pyramids of sugar and cigarette boxes. The doors are open to all
comers, but the prices — ten or twenty times higher than on the

413

414 DISILLUSIONMENT

same goods rationed — are barriers; otherwise the shops would be
picked clean in a few seconds. People come in to look (secretly
they call the new emporia “Stalin museums”) ; a few buy minute
amounts and run off excitedly with the tiny treasures. These shops
give a new popular measure for earnings — the average national
weekly wage is half a pound of commercial butter, or ten packs of
commercial cigarettes, or a pound of sausage. Acidulous anecdote
runs: “Have you seen the atheist shops?” “Why atheist?” “The
prices are ungodly .” The ordinary cooperative stores are more drab
by contrast.

New stories are being added to old buildings on nearly every
street, with small respect for the original architecture: raw patch-
work effects. Ostensibly built for the “workers” in various enter-
prises, they are in fact occupied by factory directors, trade union
functionaries, communists with a pull. But the ancient skylines of
dome and cupola and tender tracings on gray cloud masses are
as yet unchanged; at twilight, the flat silhouettes seem cut from
cardboard to illustrate tales from the Arabian Nights. The hushed,
mysterious Muscovite night is crumbling at both edges: soon it
will be a mere sliver of darkness.

Four months’ absence suffices to overlay Moscow with strange-
ness. Not the tinsel-strangeness, this time, of the first arrival, but
a half-angry astonishment that the memories you edited out are
true after all. Away from Russia, your mind imposed its own
favorite designs upon the Soviet contradictions, choosing, discard-
ing, arranging, hastily repairing the damage wrought by three
years of immersion. Whatever your American lectures may have
done to the listeners, they almost convinced the lecturer. By com-
promising with your experiences you nearly sneaked back into the
comfortable groove of uncritical faith. Against the uncertainties of
depression America you raised the future-tense certainties of Rus-
sia. You slid into the soporific illogic of status quo: the dead are
dead and the maimed are dying, and what if another million
dung-colored Russians are driven into the marshes and forests and
deserts, if the great idea marches forward toward a painted rising
sun on a painted horizon and our side wins; meanwhile, you relish
a private vengeance against the soup lines on Times Square.

Had I remained in America permanently I might have evolved
a new, if badly scarred and patched, enthusiasm. In the following

“socialism” revised

415

years I was to think occasionally, with a sense of having escaped
something vaguely shameful, that if I had not returned to Russia
in 1931, I might have ended by contributing high-minded lies to
the New Masses and slept happily ever after.

I made a quick survey of my Russian acquaintances for casual-
ties. As always, a few had disappeared mysteriously; one had been
executed; a few had returned from exile, but were still exiled for
us since they dared not nod recognition. Others formerly under
a political cloud were back in the sunlight of divine grace, one of
them so cocksure that he came boldly to our door. A more tolerant
attitude toward intellectuals and technical specialists was impend-
ing; already the tone of the press was somewhat milder towards
them. A number of acquaintances from the halcyon days of 1928
therefore timidly revived our friendship, as though emerging from
some long illness; apologetic about the yearslong absences: “you
know how it is. . .

But the waves of arrests had not subsided; that “little suitcase”
was not unpacked. The complicated fears were as oppressive as
ever. The center of attack might be shifted from one social element
to another, but the total pressure was, if anything, enlarged. A
slight lifting of the weight from the educated classes was more
than balanced by renewed terror applied to former “Nepmen,”
to Jews with relatives abroad, and to others who might be made
to bleed gold. And behind these urban activities of the G.P.U. was
its steady, plodding, monotonous punishment of “recalcitrant”
peasants: those kulaks and “kulak agents” and poor peasants with
“kulak mentalities,” who multiplied paradoxically in precisely
those areas where they had been officially “liquidated 100%.”

“Valuta arrests,” of which I had heard vaguely before depar-
ture, had in the interim become epidemic: anyone suspected of
possessing foreign currency or gold was liable to sudden arrest.
Even servant girls denounced as owning a tsarist gold coin were
hauled in and given the works. Had I heard how a blundering
militiaman picked up the wrong Petrov and he turned out to
be a friend of Stalin’s but he had four days of the farilka (torture
by heat) before the mistake was found out?

The newspapers were filled with the same braggadocio and
threats. Victories, successes, triumphs, but the plan for spring sow-
ing far behind; three shot for sabotaging the rabbit-breeding plans;

DISILLUSIONMENT

416

engineman and signalmen shot for counter-revolutionary negli-
gence in connection with a disaster on the Kursk line 5 eighty-four
arrested for forging bread ration cards. Another internal loan was
being oversubscribed — “voluntary” contributions of a month’s
wages or two months 2 * * 5 wages. Another blast-furnace started in
Magnitogorsk. Poincare-War and agents of imperialism and das-
tardly kulaks and Left-Right and Right-Left deviators and secret
Trotskyists and heil Stalin and 2 + 2 = 5. A sixteen-column speech
by Lazar Kaganovich flaying the deviators and the kulaks who 5 d
smuggled themselves into the collectives and hail Stalin, our dear
beloved, the genius of the revolution. Kaganovich quoting Stalin’s
quotation of Lenin’s quotation of Marx’s quotation, the editorials
quoting Kaganovich, and all the frightened moles with dispatch-
cases under their wings quoting the editorials to play safe.

No, says Nathalie, my secretary, no cable news today. Sorry.

A reporter returning to Moscow after a few months’ absence
cannot take up his work where he left off, as he might in another
capital. He must peel off the strangeness and re-focus eyes and
mind to the scene. He must refresh his understanding of the eu-
phemistic code in which events are recorded for the masses and
sharpen his perceptions of the overtones of the news.

2

Feeling my way through dim stale corridors to the censors’

ofSce for a frigidly cordial reception. We all know I’d been kept
waiting in Berlin for a visa this time as a disciplinary measure
. . . a hint to the wise, you know. But we say nothing about it.
For all my caution I had evidently said too much in America 5
I would have to exert myself mightily to reconquer my status of
“friendly” correspondent. . . .

Kostya Umansky, the new censor, smiled through his gold
teeth and blinked through his thick glasses and asked pompous
questions about American recognition. Yes, he knew I had seen
Secretary of State Stimson. Oh, we know everything, everything,
Gene. There was the unspoken feud between us begun three years
ago at my party in the Grand Hotel. Our conversation was on a
high level of international affairs, but under it I read in his golden
smile, “You dislike me because I’m an egocentric Soviet go-getter,

“socialism” revised

417

but watch me rise to commissar. . . And he must have read in
my smile, “The pompous little careerist, beneficiary of the revo-
lution. He hates me because he knows I see through him. A little
storekeeper with a corner on revolution: ladies and gents, the
genuine article in proletarian dictatorship!” In this suavely
scheming Comrade Umansky, clever with the devious shrewdness
of a clothing salesman, ironical to underlings and toadying to
higher-ups, discreetly indulging a sybaritic streak, I was coming
to see (perhaps unfairly, but despite myself) the quintessence of
revolutionary technique.*

The Hammer mansion on Petrovsky Pereulok, where we lived,
with its marble staircase and vast ballroom, its immense pseudo-
artistic nudes, its kitchen as large as a field and Shura cooking
barley-and-mushroom soup for the American prodigals, was some
more 2 + 2 = 5. Around the courtyard, in what were formerly
stables and servants’ quarters, more than a dozen families were
squeezed together. The sight of the foreigners’ spacious life, the
sound of their American gramophones, the odors of their daily
meat must have been a constant taunt. The children stood on tip-
toe and looked into the wonder-windows. Dr. Hammer’s big
untamed wolfhound was chained all day in the corridor leading
to the kitchen, and at night was unchained to guard the “black,”
or servants’, entrance against intruders. I must get used once
more to the indecency of living safely and comfortably in the en-
circling dreads and shortages.

Not that the comforts were idyllic. The bathtub, it is true, was
tremendously large; but when the heating device, after hours of
fussing, yielded only a few gallons of hot water, the size of the
bathtub was less a blessing than a jeer. While I was in America
my extension of Hammer’s telephone had been cut off without
explanation. Covering the news without a phone being impossible,
I plunged into a two months’ battle against bureaucratic procrasti-
nation in which I enlisted the Foreign Office and the G.P.U. for
ultimate victory. The roominess of the mansion made it a natural
gathering place for celebration occasions in the American colony,
which was pleasant enough but a heavy drain on the exchequer.

* Umansky came to Washington in 1936 as Counselor of the Soviet Embassy.

41 8 DISILLUSIONMENT

Charles Malamuth occupied our space while we were away and
upheld its record for hospitality. His wife, Joan London (daugh-
ter of Jack London), had joined him in Moscow. Later E. E.
Cummings, American poet, moved in for a while. Other Ameri-
cans, among them the Gene Tunneys, had been entertained in
the style which a foreign food shop and Shura’s cookery made
possible. Shura and her glowering ways were attaining interna-
tional fame of a sort. Her clumsy peasant figure, the flashes of
earthly shrewdness and peasant greed out of the depths of her
tight-lipped reticence, impressed foreigners as enigmatic. Shura
figured in Cummings’ book about his Russian sojourn as “ogress” 5
Dr. Hammer appears as “Chinesey,” Charlie as “Turk” or “As-
syrian,” Joan as “Turkess” or “Harem.” Incidentally, what I
understood of that book, Efana, was so good, so penetrating, that
I still wish he had not written it in puzzlewords.

Though Joan’s father is one of the most widely read foreign
authors, ranking with Russia’s greatest story-tellers in popular
favor, her presence was adamantly, and a bit ostentatiously, ignored
by the press and in literary circles. Her husband’s outspoken dis-
like for the more brutal aspects of the Bolshevism for which he
gave up his college career may have had something to do with
the snub. Joan had inherited much of her father’s passion for
social justice, which is the worst possible equipment for an appre-
ciation of the U.S.S.R. Her abstract admirations had disintegrated
almost instantly into seething angers and ironies between the time
I had seen her in New York and this reunion in Moscow. Such
speedy disillusionments annoyed me unreasonably — mine had taken
three years — and I found myself reproving her for the intensity
of her objections to the Soviet atmosphere and policies.

With every week after my return I came to feel more ashamed
of my mealy-mouthed caution while at home. Deep under those
excuses I had made for myself, I now was forced to admit, had
been the subconscious desire to remain 'persona grata with the mas-
ters, to retain my job. I was protecting my status as a “friendly”
correspondent. And at that I had just about crawled under the
line. . . .

I watched the men and women in queues, in fetid street cars,
in fear-soaked offices and felt as though I had played them false.
In the first half of my Soviet sojourn, I had felt guilty toward

“SOCIALISM ?? REVISED

4 ^

the revolution every time the exigencies of my trade obliged m<
to report facts that sounded discreditable to the U.S.S.R. In th<
second half, I was to feel constantly more guilty toward the Rus-
sian people whenever the exigencies of my trade obliged me tc
keep mum about some unpleasant truths. It was this gradual anc
inexorable shift of vantage point that sums up the transformatior
in me. The change may have been accomplished before I left, but
it was upon my return — in the gnawing suspicion that I had some-
how betrayed the Russian people by minimizing and concealing
their sufferings — that I came consciously to recognize my new
viewpoint.

3

Where the basic conditions of existence for a hundred million
people may be altered with one brief and arbitrary ukase , history
becomes curiously telescoped and foreshortened, like those motion
pictures where you see the growth of a plant from seed to full
flower in a few seconds. Processes that elsewhere mature slowly,
in a totalitarian state sometimes come to fruition in a week or a
day. In going off on a vacation you may miss the turning point
of another “epoch.”

Though the implications of the break were not at once apparent,
I did recognize that I had missed such a turning point. Charlie,
who had held down my job creditably during these months,
brought me up to date on the outward signs of the change. The
piece-work system of payment for labor, against which trade
unions all over the world have carried on a relentless war, was
introduced throughout Soviet industry, and even on collective
farms. A complicated system of prizes, bonuses, and other cash
rewards for better work was instituted. Shock-brigadiering or pace-
setting on the job had been from the beginning stimulated by
tangible privileges, but painstakingly draped in pretenses of un-
diluted patriotism $ much of the pretense was now dropped and
the emphasis placed more frankly on the material rewards.

The common denominator of these and related changes was the
abandonment of “equality” — in income, living standards, social
privileges, etc. — as a socialist objective. It had never existed, of
course, as a practical reality, but had been accepted as a motivating
ideal, as one of those patterns of perfection which all societies set

DISILLUSIONMENT

420

up. Even during the Nep period, when disequality had been as
wide as in any capitalist land, and a lot more vulgar, the central
star of socialist idealism — “from each according to his capacity, to
each according to his need” — had been undimmed. The few iso-
lated “communes” in various parts of the Soviet Union, where all
were expected to give their best work and then drew from the
common wealth according to their needs, had been the pride of
the Soviet leaders, the ultimate hope in functioning in miniature.

With the end of Nep, that hope had been intensified. The
impetus behind the Five Year Plan and the ruthless drive for
agrarian socialization had been collectivist. Among the members of
the Communist Party themselves the ideal ever since Lenin’s days
was symbolized in the “party maximum” — a ceiling on income
reminiscent of the Christian vow of poverty in certain monastic
orders.

Early in 1931, this ideal was thrown overboard. These antici-
pations of collectivism were not merely liquidated but drenched
with ridicule. Marx and other socialist prophets were re-inter-
preted ; the “party maximum” was raised and ultimately abolished j
wage differentiation was not only recognized but made obligatory.
Plays and novels which celebrated equality were suddenly out of
date and even “reactionary.” Those foreign books which stressed
the theoretical economic equality of commissars and ditch-diggers
became obsolete and rather preposterous.

It was, of course, the practical needs of industrialization which
caused the revision of fundamental faith. To make the newly cre-
ated industries more productive, to reduce spoilage, to extract more
labor from its people, the Kremlin had decided to bring back the
driving force of personal gain. To make the Communist Party
members more ambitious, the limitations on incomes were re-
moved and membership converted from a semi-religious vocation
into a profession, like politics in other countries.

I am running considerably ahead of the story. Though achieved
by fiat, the change, amounting to a reversal of philosophy, took
years to deepen and harden and to systematize its justifications in
brand-new theories of socialism. Higher productivity of labor,
more “profitable” conduct of state trusts — in short, efficiency — •
could not be raised above the older and traditional socialist ideals
overnight. Factory output could not supersede the well-being of

“socialism” revised

421

the workers as the primary socialist goal without a term of violent
mental adjustment. Thousands would be punished as “Left devi-
ationists” and “petty bourgeois romanticists/ 5 before the new pat-
tern of perfection would be fixed upon the nation’s mind and
spirit. Vestiges of mankind’s ancient dream of equality — that dream
running through all religions from Christianity to essential com-
munism which, for all its “impractical” and “utopian” character,
has molded mankind’s history — would have to be stamped out.

It required a year or two of ideological jugglery before the
absence of equality, once an evil to be faced and mitigated, was
turned into a positive Bolshevik virtue. It was Stalin who made
the word uravnilovka — the equalizing of economic returns — a term
of contempt and one of the major Soviet sins from this time for-
ward. It was Stalin, too, who in February, 1934, would character-
ize equality as “a piece of petty bourgeois stupidity, worthy of a
primitive sect of ascetics, but not of socialist society organized on
Marxian lines.”

On June 23, 193 1, Stalin made a speech at a closed conference.
Early in July it was published. We transmitted it to the world
as marking a new turn in Soviet policy almost as sharp as Lenin’s
announcement of the New Economic Policy just a decade before.
But most of us failed to see, and all of us failed to report, two
significant differences.

In the first place, Lenin’s turn had been preceded by an intense
open discussion within the ruling Party and to some extent out-
side its ranks 5 whereas Stalin consulted neither the people nor
his Party. He consulted only his immediate advisers, and the
about-face took the communists as much by surprise as the general
public.

In the second place, Lenin’s move had been frankly a compro-
mise with realities, admittedly a step backward, and made without
scrapping the fundamental socialist dream. Stalin’s “new economic
policy,” on the contrary, was represented as a step forward. In
reducing the worker more effectively to an inert cog in the pro-
ductive machine, in strengthening the foundations for new classes
and castes in the population, there was no hint of strategic retreat.

This was no temporary compromise but a permanent acceptance
of the totalitarian principle of unstinting exploitation of workers
for the impersonal profit of the corporate state-employer (as

DISILLUSIONMENT

422

against the capitalist principle of personal profit for a private
corporation-employer) .

Stalin promulgated a six-point program for raising productivity
and reducing waste in Soviet economic life. Considered purely
from the standpoint of production, the program was sane enough.
It called for more rigid cost-accounting. It eliminated the last
trace of “interference” by workers with the operation of any plant,
prescribing centralized and personal responsibility, with the man-
agement accountable only to the directors of the trust. It made
piece-work and other familiar efficiency devices universal and oblig-
atory. It called a halt to indiscriminate persecution of technical
specialists, asserting that the opposition of this class had now been
broken.

Though cushioned in standardized banalities about victories and
proletarian enthusiasm, Stalin’s speech was a more devastating
indictment of Stalin’s economic regime than any of his enemies
had made. In the majority of Soviet enterprises, he revealed, the
turnover of labor forces was “at least from 30 to 40% . . . dur-
ing half a year or even a quarter of a year.” The vast majority
of workers were deserting their jobs “to go elsewhere, to a dif-
ferent place, to seek fortune.” “Rationalization of industry,” he
said, had “long ago gone out of style.” Soviet enterprises had
“long ago ceased to count, to calculate, to make up actual bal-
ances of incomes and expenditures.” Many of the plans presum-
ably fulfilled, or even overfulfilled, were just “on paper.” The
non-stop work-week, foisted on the population in the most callous
disregard of its own comfort or wishes, Stalin now admitted to be
uneconomic, harmful, merely “an uninterrupted week on paper.”

In short, near the end of the third year of the Five Year Plan,
at a time when officially the U.S.S.R. had entered the stage of
“real socialism,” millions of workers were in perpetual migration
“to seek fortune” — to seek, that is, tolerable living conditions. In
the fantastic eagerness to set records of speed, to crowd five years
into four, to provide boastful statistics at any cost in human suffer-
ing, industry has been thrown tragically out of balance — some
branches growing by 40%, others (among them basic branches
like the coal industry and heavy metallurgy) by only 6 to 10%;
and much of this growth chiefly “on paper.” “Nobody is account-
able for anything,” Stalin complained. Worse than that, the leaders

“socialism” revised

423

of industry understand all that, but — I quote Stalin’s words again
— “they hold their tongues. Why? From all evidence, because they
are afraid of the truth.” He did not, however, explain why these
leaders are afraid of the truth. That would involve public admis-
sion that the truth is dangerous, that those who dare to protest
end up in concentration camps, that an economic system under the
knout of the G.P.U. makes blind obedience the only guarantee
of safety.

Stalin’s speech was greeted by his own press, and by the parrot
communist and near-communist press abroad, as another mani-
festation of his genius. Under any system of life which holds lead-
ers responsible for their blunders, particularly when those blunders
mean privation and death for great masses of people, a speech
such as this would automatically have eliminated Stalin and his
associates from public life. Under dictatorship, however, the recog-
nition of disaster three years too late, after exiling and imprisoning
and executing those who dared warn or oppose the blundering
regime, becomes a superior sort of wisdom. Stalin was praised
rhapsodically for his long blindness — just as he was glorified the
year before for recognizing too late his own mistakes in the pre-
cipitate liquidation of the kulaks.

Dialectic materialism, whatever else it may be, is the smuggest
and most convenient philosophy ever adapted by a ruling caste to
its political needs. It finds a bogus consistency in the most startling
inconsistencies. There is something monstrous in a dialectic ma-
terialism which exploits in order to end exploitation, which flouts
elementary human values in the name of humanity, which forti-
fies new classes to achieve a classless society; which, in brief, pre-
sumes to be as heartless as history, instead of opposing its dreams
and its hopes to history’s heartlessness.

4

Out of the Russian Revolution has grown a lush literature of
apologetics, nurtured by faith, fertilized by professional self-inter-
est, feeding upon the ardent hopes of mankind for adjuster world.
That literature sounds the whole register of motivation, from
principled Jesuitism to unprincipled cynicism, from frantic self-
deception to calculated deception of others. It has been particularly

DISILLUSIONMENT

424

prolific in the United States, if only because geographical and cul-
tural distance from Russia and political naivete make Americans
especially credulous.

Having some acquaintance both with the authors and their sub-
ject matter, I have found that literature fascinating, a little like
watching jugglers and conjurors at work. An intelligent and tal-
ented American woman long resident in Russia, for instance, used
to visit us frequently and often bared her aching doubts 5 her
Puritan conscience was wounded by the sight of useless brutalities,
her mind lacerated by organized suppression of thought. But I
studied her books and found in them no trace of her wounds and
doubts, and I marvel at the mental and emotional sleight-of-
hand that pulls such pretty rabbits out of the Soviet hat. A free-
lance American journalist vehemently denied the stories of valuta
tortures 5 then I learned that he was trying to rescue his own Rus-
sian relatives from the torture chambers!

Charitably, I had preferred to believe that these people were
lying for the cause, sacrificing the lesser truths for those they con-
sidered greater. But ever so often I was confronted with a state-
ment so cynical that I could not bring myself to believe its piety,
an insult to the readers 5 sanity so pointed that charitable inter-
pretation could not compass it.

A book by Louis Fischer, having eulogized the G.P.U. forced
labor battalions as a “cure by labor/ 5 and having indicated casually
that this “cure 55 has been “administered to untold myriads in all
parts of the country, 55 said:

The G.P.U. is not merely an intelligence service and a militia. It
is a vast industrial organization and a big educational institution.

Thus virtual slavery for “untold myriads in all parts of the coun-
try 55 is disposed of in one sentence. The system of large-scale
forced labor, with a hundred thousand concentrated in a single
penal camp and scores of such camps festering everywhere in the
land, summarized in one precious euphemism!

A visit to Bolshevo, a boys 5 reformatory run by the G.P.U.
near Moscow, was Fischer’s immediate occasion for the extraordi-
nary generalization. Bolshevo is one of the standard tourist show-
places, and deservedly that: an enlightened colony for criminals
in line with modern prison reform ideas. It is no more typical of

“socialism” revised

425

the G.P.U. concentration camps than a model prison in New
York is of chain-gangs in the South. For every thief or rowdy
in places like Bolshevo, there were a thousand political offenders,
“recalcitrant” peasants, non-conforming professors and engineers,
deviating communists, living and working and dying like flies in
forced-labor camps. The myriads to whom Fischer refers were
filling swamplands, chopping timber, mining metals and chemicals,
cutting canals, building railroads under police lash, in conditions
so vile that the few straight-forward accounts which have been
written (in books like the Tchernavins’ and George Kitchin’s)
make Dante’s Inferno look like a vacation resort. For every model
prison, there were dozens of foul holes brimming with horror 3
for every Bolshevo, half a hundred Butirkas.

No tourist parties were taken to visit those places. The few
foreign correspondents who attempted to visit them were always
prevented. A Canadian newspaperwoman who succeeded by wile
in entering a concentration camp and dared to write about it was
quickly expelled from the country. Though even an accredited
Kremlin press agent occasionally refers to “myriads” taking the
forcible “cure by labor,” the government concealed the extent of
forced labor. However, from the isolated official admissions by
the government (at least 200,000 prisoners engaged on the Baltic-
White Sea Canal, several hundred thousand in double-tracking the
Trans-Siberian Railroad, etc.) a conservative estimate of the total
at the time when Fischer’s “vast industrial organization” was at
its vastest would be two millions. If we add the exiled peasants
transported to areas under G.P.U. supervision — technically free
but as helplessly the creatures of the G.P.U. as any prisoner — the
total would at least be tripled.

Those who shouted hallelujahs to the Five Year Plan either
were ignorant or pretended ignorance of the fact that the most
extensive and most effective taskmaster and employer of labor
was the police apparatus of the government. Its concentration
camp near Moscow alone — one of several along the trek of the
Moskva-Volga Canal under construction — contained more prison-
ers than all of Hitler’s concentration camps put together. It con-
tributed large contingents of forced labor to Magnitostroi, Dnie-
prostroi, and other of the proudest items in the Plan. William
Stoneman of the Chicago Daily News at one time obtained from

DISILLUSIONMENT

426

over-communicative local officials exact figures showing that pris-
oners outnumbered free laborers on the construction end of Magni-
tostroi and a series of other projects. William Henry Chamberlin
of the Christian Science Monitor, who traveled widely through
newly industrialized areas, wrote: “I could testify from personal
observation that tens of thousands of such prisoners, mostly exiled
peasants who had been guilty of no criminal offense, were em-
ployed at compulsory labor at such places as Magnitogorsk, Chelia-
binsk, and Berezniki.” Indeed, whatever differences there may
have been in our estimates of the number in G.P.U. peonage, the
existence of such peonage was accepted in Moscow as normal,
matter-of-course, and indisputable.

The blossoming of the G.P.U. into a “vast industrial organi-
zation” began with the liquidation of the kulaks in 1930. The
police suddenly found themselves in charge of enormous masses
of raw labor — herded deliberately into harsh sections of the coun-
try where free labor could not be lured. Subsequent mass arrests
in city and country alike expanded this labor force, and the influx
of engineers and specialists by the tens of thousands gave the
G.P.U. a terrorized technical personnel as well. Specific industrial
jobs were therefore assigned to this “educational institution,” par-
ticularly in the Far North, the Central Asiatic wilderness, and the
more inhospitable sectors of Siberia. When the civilian economic
authorities could not cope with a particularly difficult industrial
task — certain chemical enterprises in the sub-Arctic territory, for
instance — it was taken over by the G.P.U. and administered with
compulsory labor by “educational” methods which included brutal
beatings, a diet of garbage, a fearsome mortality rate, a regime
that shriveled the spirit and withered the body of the victims and
degraded the masters no less than the slaves.

Only the most hardened fanatic can read the stories of the
Tchernavins and Kitchin without a shudder of horror. Not the
blandest of apologists can deny the essential accuracy of those ac-
counts ; only a literary genius the peer of Dante could have con-
jured brutality in such meticulous detail from his own imagination.
It happens that, like others who lived in Russia during the Five
Year Plan era, I have talked to dozens of people who had sur-
vived those “educational” purgatories. What they told fitted so

“socialism” revised 427

perfectly into the Tchernavin and Kitchin stories that there is no
room for doubt.

I am not inveighing against labor by prisoners. I simply ques-
tion the “revolutionary” pretensions of a society which counts its
prisoners by the million, subjects them to hideously inhumane
conditions, then seeks to fool the world into accepting the mon-
strosity as an Educational institution.” I question the “building of
socialism” by slaves. I question the unprecedented hypocrisy that
would rally the noblest instincts of the outside world, the soaring
hopes inspired by the Russian Revolution, in blind support of
human degradation and organized sadism.

II. Bernard Shaw in Moscow

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW swept down on Moscow, that
August, his white whiskers and coat-tails and wisecracks flying —
Lady Astor holding on breathlessly to the coat-tails, the American
correspondents scrambling desperately for the wisecracks, the Rus-
sians gazing goggle-eyed at the strange antics. Lord Lothian and
Lady Astor’s handsome and sensible son, David, were in the party
and grateful for the shadows while the other two held the lime-
light. From the first, the Irish bard was surrounded and cut off
from contaminating contact with Russian facts by British and
American yes-men for the Soviets and by Russian functionaries.
They had a simple job of it. The great G.B.S. was more interested
in being seen than in seeing, in being heard than in hearing.
He exhibited himself at banquets, in a factory or two, on a hand-
tooled collective farm, astride the Napoleon cannon in the Krem-
lin, wherever cameramen could get good shots of him and he
could deliver better shots.

We wondered at the time that a playwright wise in the tricks
of stage effect should be taken in so completely by his hosts and
guides. Then we understood that he was not taken in, but him-
self collaborating in the deception, with the world at large as the
common dupe. The Kremlin was too good an eminence from which
to thumb his nose at the conventional capitalist world, and Shaw
evidently had decided not to miss the chance. At first, Soviet offi-
cialdom was uneasy: the incorrigible oldster might play a few
pranks on them. He might pry into their closets for skeletons
of forced labor, valuta arrests, concentration camps, or make nasty
remarks about the hard-worked and undernourished proletariat.
He might demand statistics on political prisoners. But their fears
were quickly allayed. Shaw was clearly in his most expansive and
playful mood and would praise everything Soviet if only to annoy
dear Nancy Astor. She mothered him, and the least he could do
was to act the bad boy. (Mrs. Shaw had warned her to see to it

428

BERNARD SHAW IN MOSCOW 429

that G.B. did not neglect his beard 5 Lady Astor made sure by
washing it herself.)

Shaw did twit the Bolsheviks a bit on their ignorance of social-
ism, and shocked them with a few quips at Lenin’s expense. But
that was nothing, as long as his main preoccupation was to make
faces at the decaying bourgeois world through Soviet windows.

It was a fortnight of clowning that ran us ragged. Since I re-
ported for British United Press as well as the mother agency, I
could not afford to miss a Shavian wheeze or sneeze. My secretary
camped in the Metropole lobby, someone else trailed the party
on its sight-seeing trips. Deftly Shaw skimmed the surface, care-
ful not to break through the lacquer of appearances 5 if Lady Astor
asked too many questions he neatly slapped her wrist. He judged
food conditions by the Metropole menu, collectivization by the
model farm, the G.P.U. by the model colony at Bolshevo, social-
ism by the twittering of attendant sycophants. His performance
was not amusing to the Russians, I happen to know. It was ma-
cabre. The lengthening obscenity of ignorant or indifferent tourists,
disporting themselves cheerily on the aching body of Russia,
seemed summed up in this cavorting old man, in his blanket en-
dorsement of what he would not understand. He was so taken up
with demonstrating how youthful and agile he was that he had
no attention to spare for the revolution in practice.

His seventy-fifth birthday took place while he was in Moscow
and the celebration was staged at the old Nobles’ Club, in the
immense chamber with its ghosts of many farcical demonstration
trials. It was at this gathering that Shaw achieved the apex of
cynicism. In any other man it might have been ignorance or stu-
pidity; in Shaw it was cold and calculated taunting of the audience.
Shaw could not have failed to know that Russia was suffering
acute food shortage. Rations were growing shorter; some food-
stuffs had disappeared altogether; scant quotas of milk and butter
were reserved for children only, and were available only at long
intervals; food prices had just been doubled. All the hopes and
thoughts of the overwhelming mass of Russians were centered
on this fearful shortage. And in the face of all this, the rosy-
cheeked self-satisfied foreigner stood on a platform and mocked
the Soviet hardships.

DISILLUSIONMENT

430

“When my friends learned that I was going to Russia / 3 he
said, “they loaded me with tinned food of all sorts. They thought
Russia was starving. But I threw all their food out of the window
in Poland before I reached the Soviet frontier.” He laughed like
a mischievous schoolboy.

The vision of good English food thrown away in Poland was
mockery of the underfed audience. Shaw’s listeners gasped. One
felt the convulsive reaction in their bellies. A tin of English beef
would provide a memorable holiday in the home of any of the
workers and intellectuals at that gathering — and those tins lay
scattered in Poland. Even before he reached Russia, Shaw as-
sured them, he knew that this talk of food difficulties was poppy-
cock. Why, he had been overstuffed ever since he reached Moscow
(forced wry laughter). Forty-eight food specialists had been shot
last year in one clip to explain the lack of food, and international
“plots 33 had been woven by the secret service to explain it. Shaw,
however, knew it to be poppycock through his superior intuition
and his full stomach.

He talked at length that night. Others loaded him with praise
second only to the praise he loaded on himself. But his cynical
tale of throwing away food was the one memory that remained
deeply chiseled into a thousand minds when the celebration dis-
persed.

At a luncheon in the Metropole next day, Mrs. William Henry
Chamberlin remarked to Shaw that Russians were sorry he did
not wait to throw away his food on Soviet soil. Shaw looked around
the restaurant and asked cutely, “Where do you see any food
shortage ? 33 Mrs. Chamberlin tried to tell him.

“I have a four-year-old daughter , 33 she said. “As a foreigner
I can buy all the milk she needs, but if I were dependent on the
Russian milk rations my little girl would suffer terribly . 33

“Why don 3 t you nurse her yourself ? 33 Shaw retorted.

“But she 3 s four, she 3 s too old. . . . 33

“Nonsense! Certain Eskimos nurse their children till the age
of twenty . 33

Shaw wrote and spoke extensively on Russia after he got home.
His every sentence carried the proof that he had seen nothing
and learned nothing in his Soviet visit. In broadcasting on the

BERNARD SHAW IN MOSCOW

431

Russian theme to the United States, he addressed American listen-
ers with some such greeting as “Hello, boobs!” Perhaps he knew
more about Russia than he let on.

Bernard Shaw made a large contribution toward the myth of
a happy, prospering, enthusiastic socialist Russia being built up in
the outside world, especially among a certain type of intellectual.
For the Webbs and people like them, there is at least the excuse
of wishful thinking: they were eagerly molding a make-believe
Russia close to their own heart’s desire. Shaw had already attained
his heart’s desire. His humanitarianism was a self-indulgence
rather than an ideal, or he would have revealed some slight twinge
of awareness of the Russian humanity.

In a book published five years later by an Italian refugee from
Mussolini’s penal colony on Lipari Island ( Road to Exile y by
Emilio Lussu), he tells how the small library collected by the
prisoners was suppressed:

Hundreds of volumes were confiscated as dangerous to the regime;
every book on the French and Russian Revolutions, all works by Rus-
sian writers and all works by free-thinkers such as Voltaire, Mazzini,
and Anatole France. Only Bernard Shaw was respected. It was a bad
moment for his admirers.

Shaw’s clowning in Russia was no less a bad moment for his
admirers in Moscow. Nor is it without significance that those who
take Bolshevik excesses in their stride find it equally easy to take
fascist enormities in their stride. It is no accident that Shaw has
praised Hitler, too.

2

It was at a party in honor of the guests given by the British
Embassy that the one exciting news story in the whole Shaw-
Astor show developed. I was standing near Maxim Litvinov, Com-
missar of Foreign Affairs, on the small terrace leading from the
house into the embassy garden when Lady Astor came toward
us. She was followed by a few correspondents who had smelled
excitement. A telegram fluttered in her hand. The commissar’s
fleshy face changed color as Lady Astor, with a grand gesture,
kneeled before him and held out the telegram.

“As in days of yore,” she declaimed for all to hear, “I present

DISILLUSIONMENT

43 2

a petition to your government on bended knee. Most humbly I
pray you in the name of humanity to save this suffering family.”

Litvinov’s fingers trembled and his jaws worked nervously as
he took the telegram and read through it hastily. Then he shoved
it back at her.

"This matter is not within my jurisdiction,” he said gruffly,
without troubling to conceal his anger, and walked away.

The correspondents took possession of the telegram. It was a
story, and an “American-angle story,” if ever there was one. The
message, addressed to both Shaw and Lady Astor, was signed by
a Professor Krynin, of Yale University, and begged for their in-
tercession to get his family out of Russia. Some years previously,
he had left Russia and for reasons of his own had been afraid to
return. Now he was under sentence of death, like all who failed
to obey an official summons to come back. Whatever his political
sins, his wife and his children were innocent. They were in Mos-
cow now. For years the professor had been trying to get them
to America. A request by the eminent Britishers, he thought, might
obtain the release of his family.

We all hopped to it. The message gave Mrs. Krynin’s address,
and thither we raced. The poor woman nearly collapsed with
fright and excitement when the reporters descended on her. She
knew nothing of her husband’s desperate cable and was in no way
responsible for it. Fearful that this move would only make her
position worse, she at first refused to speak. Under pressure, she
admitted that she lived only to care for her children and in the
hope of some day joining their father. But she uttered not a word
of criticism of the Soviet government.

With Shaw and Lady Astor in Moscow, the censors could
scarcely interfere with the sending of our dispatches, and the story
was a three-day sensation in the American press. Lady Astor did
not accept Litvinov’s refusal but carried the matter to other offi-
cials, including the G.P.U.5 in particular, she used publicity
through the correspondents in the hope of forcing action. She was
stalled with promises. The Soviet government, she was assured,
had no desire to keep a wife and children from their husband and
father. But by the time she left, nothing had been done. And
after she left, of course, the matter was forgotten.

BERNARD SHAW IN MOSCOW 433

Four or five months later, I received a cable from Roger Bald-
win, director of the American Civil Liberties Union, asking me to
ascertain if possible the whereabouts of Mrs. Krynin. Her hus-
band was in despair, he indicated, having failed to hear from her
or about her since his ill-advised message to the English party.

At the address where we had seen Mrs. Krynin before, the
people who opened the door of her apartment pretended that they
had never even heard the name. “No, no, there’s no such person,”
they said and shut the door in my face in a panic. Going down
the steep stairs I ran into a boy of ten.

“Do you live here?” I asked him.

“Yes.”

“Well, then, maybe you know what apartment Citizen Krynin
lives in?”

“She doesn’t live here any more.”

“She doesn’t?” I pretended surprise. “Then where does she
live?”

“How should I know?” the child replied. “They came and
took her a long time ago.”

So I knew. “They” came and took her. How many others who
disappeared in these years had been taken by “them”? Every night
the big “black Marias” moved through the stillness collecting an-
other load of undesirables. Coming home from a late party, we
often saw these wagons — immense closed-in trucks like American
long-distance furniture moving vans, with a row of perforations
near the top for air. Late one night, I rang the outer gate to a
courtyard, having been persuaded to attend a social gathering
despite the late hour. A sleepy dvornik (concierge) came to the
door rubbing his eyes.

“And I thought it was the wagon again,” he mumbled com-
plainingly. “Almost every night they come for somebody.”

“They” had come for the Krynin mother and children. Lady
Astor’s spirited intercession had landed the family in some secret
exile, where correspondents would never again write embarrassing
stories about them.

The same train that brought the Shaw-Astor party also brought
one of my chiefs, the late Robert J. Bender, news editor and Vice-

DISILLUSIONMENT

434

president of the United Press, and with him young Jack Howard,
the son of Roy W. Howard. Their lively presence made the chore
of covering the English party harder but brightened our lives
all the same. If Shaw had half the good sense and one-quarter
the honesty of Jack Howard in observing Russia, the world would
have been spared a chunk of misinformation wrapped in the cel-
lophane of Shavian paradox.

It was in the spirit of gentlemen from Missouri, who had to be
shown, that both Bender and Jack confronted the over-publicized
Russia. They stood in queues with the Russians, and took walks
into less manicured sections of the city, and supplemented the
official information with such off-record data as even a tourist can
obtain if really interested. I was no longer a volunteer propa-
gandist for the Soviet idea and the views these two carried away
were less tinctured with my synthetic optimism than those car-
ried away by Jack’s father and other United Press people who
had come under my guidance in former years.

Bernard Shaw’s frolicsome clowning gave the pitch for that
year’s visitors and for years to come. Besides the individual tour-
ists, there were groups, shepherded by alleged specialists in Soviet
affairs — the blind leading the halt. Many of these leaders had
a professional stake in the fashion for a watered-down version of
communism: annual tours, books, lectures. They could not afford
to have the doors of the U.S.S.R. shut against them by a way-
ward word, and many of them were as honestly and high-mindedly
eager as their flocks to avoid upsetting truths. Professors or liberal
clergymen, they were deeply disturbed by the shattered economic
and social orthodoxies in which they were raised; if they lost their
compensating belief in Russia life would become too bleak to en-
dure.

Their belief was plastic enough. In 1929 and 1930 they cele-
brated the “equality” of all Soviet citizens. From 1931 onward
they were no less earnestly enamored of piece work, differentiated
wages to speed up production, the “realism” of Stalin which
recognized that all men were not, after all, created equal. In
1931 they saw in the Bolshevik “Puritanism,” in the prohibition
of dancing and gypsy music, etc., the token of a new world. In

BERNARD SHAW IN MOSCOW 435

1935 they were to see the same token in the fox-trots and other
resurrected amusements. Faith moves mountains of paradox.

The building of the Russian myth required no machiavellian
propaganda tricks. The outside world in depression years had
need of it as a fixed beacon in the storm of doubt. As Voltaire said
of God — if there were no socialist Russia mankind was ready to
invent one. It was fashioned in the image of men’s hopes.

III. Ambulance and Motor-Cars

CONSIDERED in the most cold-blooded engineering spirit, with
Eeninist-Stalinist firmness and no petty bourgeois humanitarian
nonsense, the practical wisdom of placing machines before medi-
cines is still open to grave question. Broken-down factory workers
cause breakdowns in machinery and impaired office workers retard
the pace of operation. Except in agitational concoctions on the
stage, even the firmest Stalinist develops a touch of bourgeois
weakness when the missing medicines are needed for someone
whose life he values.

One of the most callous of the orthodox brethren — a Checkist,
a civil war veteran, a liquidator of kulaks — smiled grimly at our
concern for the life of Rachelle Ossipovna. The Five Year Plan,
he assured us, would not be affected in the slightest by the lady’s
passing. Despite this, I pulled official wires to obtain certain deficit
medicaments, and used incoming Americans to fill prescriptions in
Berlin; Billy canvassed our foreign friends to find citrous fruits
and other things which might help sustain Rachelle’s strength.

Much later I watched this hard-boiled Checkist when disease
struck in his own household. His hard-boiledness did not reach
all the way down. The victim was his sister-in-law, as useless to
the Piaiiletka as Rachelle had been. But his efforts to outdistance
the galloping tuberculosis were as heroic as any he put forth
in the Ukrainian civil wars.

We were to remember Rachelle’s last illness as a gruesome
epitome *of Russian indifference to human life, of the primitive
hygienic methods under the statistical triumphs of social health,
and of sheer Russian carelessness. While millions of dollars were
being poured into the purchase of machinery and raw materials
and technical services, the government never could find the means
to buy the elementary drugs and equipment for fighting disease.
There was money to buy spare parts for everything but men
and women out-of-order. Only the Kremlin Hospital, serving

436

AMBULANCE AND MOTOR-CARS 437

the most important strata of Moscow’s hierarchy, had any of a
long list of medicinal ingredients. These supplies were inacces-
sible to 99% of the Moscow population.

A disease of her gums which, with proper care and medicines,
might have been cured, infected Rachelle’s jaw. Her husband was
a big enough fish in his own pond, but a mere minnow in the com-
munist ocean. He did not rate the Kremlin Hospital. Home treat-
ment seemed preferable to the overcrowded, understaffed, and
unhygienic hospitals available to the proletariat. But when her
condition became dangerous, Rachelle was rushed to one of these
places. We visited her there — an ill-smelling, grimy barracks of a
hospital, run in the most haphazard style, bed crowded upon
bed.

It was in this hospital that Rachelle Ossipovna caught cold,
which developed into pneumonia, of which she died in a few days.
She was killed by the hospital as surely as though it had adminis-
tered arsenic.

We came, unluckily, to know a lot more about Soviet medical
practice than most of our colleagues. Like the “stable” currency
and the wonderful educational methods, the socialized medicine
under the official statistical surface was a snarl of contradictions,
shortages, and ineptness. Doctors and dentists regarded their oblig-
atory work for the state as an exaction and depended on private
practice for their real income. The more famous medical specialists
did not budge for less than fifty or a hundred rubles ; often it
required “pull” to get their services at any price. The public
health service was by all odds inferior to the free public and
charitable health services available to the poor in cities like New
York or Chicago.

Russian medicine was doing significant work in theoretical re-
search, but it was at a pitifully low level in ordinary everyday
curative and preventive practice. I had the professional opinion of
leading physicians in Moscow to confirm my own impression on
this point. The gaping gulf between abstract research and prac-
tical application, between grandiose planning and messy execu-
tion, ran through every department of Russian life, but it seemed
particularly horrifying in relation to medicine. The difference be-

438 DISILLUSIONMENT

tween the care open to the tipper few and to the gray swarms of
humanity below seemed particularly startling.

Despite the political leverage I could manipulate as a foreign
correspondent, despite my American income and contacts, illness
was fearful as it had never been under more civilized conditions.
I could not help thinking how hopeless it must be for Soviet
citizens without my advantages.

During the winter after our return from America, Billy was
taken sick. Formal letters from the Foreign Office and hours of
waiting to obtain ordinary drugs. Frenzied telephone calls to
hig h officials for their intercession in getting an out-of-the-ordinary
prescription filled. Finally, a panicky campaign to obtain an am-
bulance to transport her to the Botkinsky Hospital — regarded as
second only to the Kremlin Hospital. Three doctors in consulta-
tion had diagnosed acute appendicitis. We thought an operation
might be necessary any minute.

The day of Billy’s transfer to the hospital was the quintessence
of nightmare. It took hours of work, official influence, and more
hours of waiting to obtain an ambulance. I sat by Billy’s side as
the rickety contraption bounced over the ice-mounds and cobble-
stones, every jolt sending the patient into paroxysms of excruciat-
ing pain. The half hour’s ride seemed half a century. But finally
we drove through the gates of the Botkinsky.

“We’ve arrived, darling,” I consoled her. “You’ll be comfort-
ably in bed in a minute.”

The ambulance stopped at a small structure about a quarter of
a mile from the main building. Several orderlies began to re-
move the patient. Frantically I protested that we were not yet
at our destination.

“But first we must register the patient here,” the idiots in-
sisted.

“Never mind the registration,” I shouted. “My wife’s in agony.
She must first be taken to the hospital and made comfortable.
To hell with your red-tape!”

Over my violent protests, however, Billy was dragged from
the ambulance and carried into a drafty office. There, with the
patient on the floor, moaning, tears rolling down her cheeks, a
nurse drew out a long questionnaire form and proceeded to ask
endless questions.

AMBULANCE AND MOTOR-CARS 439

“Get her to the hospital first,” I pleaded, “and I promise to
fill out all the questionnaires you wish.”

“But those are the rules — ”

“Never mind the rules, my wife’s dying,” I shouted. “You
must send her to the hospital immediately.”

“But first we must examine her,” the nurse insisted, and, good
as her word, began to unwrap Billy in this room, with gusts of
the icy wind blowing into the place every time the door was
opened.

“Over my dead body! I’ll tear the place up, if you keep her
here another minute.”

By this time, a few other employees had gathered. They stared
at the barbarian foreigner who would not fill out forms, or allow
a suffering woman to be unwrapped and examined in a drafty and
unsanitary office. But for once the rules were shattered. For once
the relief of human pain took precedence over red-tape.

By the time I had won my fight in the office, the ambulance
disappeared. Billy was now packed into an open sled — an open
sled in sub-zero weather! — which two men pulled to the main
building. There I fought another battle with attendants to pre-
vent her going through a regulation bath in a large, ill-smelling,
filthy bathroom.

“You’ll have to wash her in bed,” I insisted. “Her strength
will give out if you torture her any more.”

“But the rules — ” The astonished women, in gray aprons, lifted
their eyebrows at such goings-on.

The first night Billy was kept in a sort of general ward, where
the screams of accident patients and the constant comings and
goings of divers people tore right through the sedatives. Next day
she was transferred to a quieter room. The label “appendicitis”
remained on her bed throughout her stay, although the diagnosis
was adjudged erroneous almost from the beginning. Another indi-
cated that she was entitled to “special feeding” — a privilege ac-
corded to the more influential patients. Black soggy bread was
the chief ingredient of the special feeding. Several times a day
a porter came through the corridor dragging a wooden box filled
with chunks of bread, and tossed a chunk with grimy fingers toward
every table. The whole hospital echoed with the rasping sounds
of that box being dragged.

DISILLUSIONMENT

44 °

Billy improved rapidly, despite the special care, and was soon
well enough to watch the conduct of that hospital by way of
sociological diversion. If I had not been there day after day
and seen some of the primitive and careless procedure myself, I
should have thought the details she told me were the effects of de-
lirium. Only a few of the women were trained nurses — the others
were ignorant girls of the servant type. They stomped up and
down corridors and banged doors and called for one another in
loud voices. Except under unusual circumstances, bed linens were
changed once a week. The blankets were not washed but merely
disinfected, so that they were crusted with the dirt and vomit of
previous patients. The precious rules prohibited the bringing of
linens, blankets, or other accessories from outside. But by devious
means I smuggled in everything Billy needed, and doctors, nurses,
patients came to her ward to inspect and exclaim over the fleecy
American blankets; the hospital buzzed with the news of a for-
eigner who changed her sheets, her nightgown, and even her pil-
low-cases, every day.

The doctors, Billy thought, were capable but overworked. I
succeeded— again by outraging the blessed rules— in having our
own physician, who was familiar with her case, treat her. As soon
as she could be moved safely she returned home.

Ever after, the glowing reports of socialized medicine in Rus-
sia in American books and magazines have been a source of amuse-
ment to us. Always we have wished their authors only one punish-
ment — a week or so as patients in the second-best hospital in Rus-
sia.

1

I rode with Boris Andreyevich Pilnyak, that cumbersome and
lovable blond bear, from Leningrad to Moscow in a shiny and
gaily painted two-seater. Not in vain his journey to America,
since it had netted the brilliant Russian novelist an automobile,
apogee of Soviet daydreams.

The reunion of Boris Andreyevich with his Chevrolet on the
docks of Peter’s city which is now Lenin’s city was most touching.
He patted it and dusted it and fed it rationed gasolene. When
he parked the creature outside a beer-hall, the leading writers of
the city came reverently to admire, and they scrupled not to

AMBULANCE AND MOTOR-CARS 44 1

show their envy. Boris Andreyevich drove through this street
and that, tooting the American-accent horn, like a little boy with
a kiddy-car. His acquisition of the car was by all odds the literary
event of the year, and I, sitting by his side in the triumphal march
upon Moscow, shared in the glory.

Though the highway is the most traveled in the land and one
of the few tolerably smooth roads, the Chevy cut a wide swathe
of excitement in the peasant humanity between the old capital and
the new. Men and women rushed from their huts to stare after
us, horses shied, dogs went wild, little boys threw stones, and
Boris Andreyevich blew his horn continuously, as though we were
traveling on horn-power alone. Wherever we paused in our three
days of leisurely driving, the entire village population soon gath-
ered to marvel and to interrogate.

In one village where we stopped to eat, paying in Leningrad
bread for fresh warm milk only slightly soiled, the name of the
novelist had percolated down to one peasant youth, who quickly
spread the news that a writer in the flesh was in their midst.
The presence of an American started another widening circle
of excitement — not so much my inconsequential corporeal self, as
the attachments thereto, such as the fabrics of my clothes, my
shoes, fountain-pen, wrist-watch and glasses. But neither a writer
nor a foreigner could compete with the central object of scrutiny,
the car. The younger and bolder men tapped its ribs with timid
knuckles and felt its upholstery and tried its horn. A very old
and gnarled woman with dragging skirts went round and round
the contraption looking for the secret.

“But how does it run, just like that, all by itself?” she wanted
to know.

Boris Andreyevich wiped the milk from his lips and strode
to the machine with the manner of a full-fledged necromancer.

“Simple as potatoes,” he said. “Come in, babushka > and Fll
show you.”

She needed a lot of coaxing by neighbors and assurances by
the driver, and her blue head-kerchief framed a terrorized lot of
wrinkles as the Chevy raced up the road and down again.

“To think that I lived to see this day,” babushka muttered as
she alighted, and there was that in her voice which implied that
she still did not quite believe it.

442 disillusionment

In the next hour nearly every man, woman and child tasted
a first ride in an automobile, with Boris Andreyevich as cheerful
and perspiring as any shock-brigadier in a poster. There is. at
least one village in Russia where everyone can talk of automobiles
from personal experience.

While my companion educated the villagers, I pushed those
relentless sociological researches which distinguish the foreigner
in Russia even more than his clothes. I listened to a long catalogue
of complaints, ranging from loss of land to lack of calico and
boots. The city people get everything while we in the village get
nothing but work and taxes. Our horses plowed better than the
tractors 5 besides, our village hasn’t got any tractor. We’re get-
ting poorer every day working for the government and only the
private peasants who take their produce to the towns live well.
After a lot more of this, I felt a tug at my sleeve. A boy of four-
teen or fifteen indicated that he wished to talk to me alone.

“Don’t believe them, they’re all kulaks!” he whispered in
great agitation. “We liquidated twelve households in this village,
but all of them deserve to be liquidated, all without exception.
. . . They’re dark people and oppose progress.”

“Why are you afraid to talk?”

“It’s hard enough living among them as it is,” the boy sighed.
“As for me, I shall leave them behind and go to the city and
be a proletarian, that’s what I’ll do. The darkness of these people
chokes me.”

“And are they really all kulaks? I mean, do they all have cows
and land?”

“No, they’re poor as mice. Most of them are in the kolkhoz.
But they think like kulaks and they should be liquidated. The
Soviet power isn’t firm enough with them, that’s what. If I had
my way — ■”

If he had his way, the whole of his native village, not ex-
cepting his own family, would be in the Northern forests chop-
ping wood. Just who would then cultivate the kolkhoz the boy
could not quite say. Not himself, certainly, since his hopes were
fixed on escape to the city.

In a dozen other villages I tried to probe. The inclination of
the peasants in talking to a stranger was clearly to lay the gloomy
colors on with a spade. Questioned by Boris Andreyevich, they

AMBULANCE AND MOTOR-CARS 443

often admitted exaggeration and admitted particularly that the
past, before the revolution, was even worse. But they were not con-
soled. The peasant who defended collectivization seemed to me
everywhere the exception 5 he spoke of necessity in the future
tense and was often jeered by the others. I recall the definite
impression that the countryside was sullen and bitter 3 and coupled
with that a sense of the obduracy, the ignorance, and the enmity
of the peasant material which the Kremlin was forcing into new
economic molds.

“Peasants always complain,” Boris Andreyevich said. “They
keep on whining, from the time they’re born till the day they
die. It has always been thus with us in Russia.”

The first night we slept in the city of Novgorod. Like a very
old and chipped icon, its colors faded, and its figures archaic, but
beautiful with the nostalgic beauty of ancient things. Novgorod
was a brilliant and wealthy capital when Moscow was still a
provincial town. Many of its moldering churches and monasteries
were now inscribed with the names of Soviet institutions, in big
red letters. A medieval convent was now used in part as a hotel and
for the rest as a vacation resort for young girls. The arrival of
the shiny car set the nuns’ cells (filled with vacationing girls)
aflutter. A few of the girls fluttered outdoors to exclaim over
the car and its occupants until a stern directress came to drive
them back.

“Just like nuns,” a plump little girl with thick straw-colored
braids complained.

But before yielding to discipline she slipped a scrap of paper
into my hand. “My address, in Leningrad, and you must let me
know when you are in Leningrad again. You’re the first foreigner
I ever talked to.”

The second night we slept in Tver. But “slept” is an exaggera-
tion. All the bedbugs in the province were holding a convention
in the bed assigned to me. Next morning I mentioned the matter
to the unshaven fellow at the hotel desk. He registered honest
astonishment — the first such complaint he had ever had.

For years after that trip I was privy to every phase of the
biography of the two-seater: its illnesses and miraculous recoveries ;
its missing parts the replacement of which sometimes required
months of conniving ; its mobilization for military service in the

444 DISILLUSIONMENT

annual maneuvers. The car was sign and proof of the affluence
of popular writers in the U.S.S.R. It set Boris Andreyevich off
from the common run of man even more than his talents and
temperament.

3

Blow, trumpet! Hail, Stalin! for now the Lyons family, too,
rolls through the capital of approximate socialism in an automo-
bile of its own. Thenceforth the family would designate chronology
for its Russian period as B.F. and A.F.: before and after the
Ford. Let censors dig their homes at the end of the world, let
news explode in the most distant aerodromes, let the Press De-
partment issue its mimeographed smudges at ungodly hours! Such
B.F. torments lost their sting A.F. Thenceforth, transportation
was no longer a lowly private vexation but a lofty public prob-
lem, like housing, liquidation of illiteracy, or differentiation of
wages. Thenceforth, mystical interviews with eloquent average
Muscovites in street-cars would be composed without the disturb-
ing memories of stench and bruises.

Semichasov, the chauffeur, sat as proudly at the wheel as though
it were a Rolls Royce; the social distance between car owners and
the trolley rabble was so great that the class distinctions between
different makes of cars counted not at all. Nor was there anything
absonant in a Ford with a chauffeur. The care of an automobile
under Moscow conditions required the full time and attention
of at least one person. Gasoline rations must be obtained at speci-
fied distributing points. Garage space (at a cost twice as big as the
average Soviet worker’s total wages) must be located, if found at
all, at a point ten miles from one’s home. The slightest repair
job necessitated days or weeks of routine grief.

Besides, driving in the rutted streets, thick-packed with the
humanity that overflowed sidewalks, zig-zagging among the slow-
moving peasant carts, required the nonchalance and the Slavic
instincts of a Semichasov. There was a magnificent optimism in the
way Russian chauffeurs cut through crowds at top speed, trim-
ming toes and shaving beards and scattering bundles but in-
credibly, miraculously, killing no one. If there was in it a shat-
tering contempt of the Russian mob, there was a profound un-
derstanding as well. Foreign drivers inched their way through

AMBULANCE AND MOTOR-CARS 445

mobs where Russian chauffeurs stepped on the gas to get through.

Now that we had a car, it was hard to imagine how we had
managed without one. Three-quarters of the physical difficulties
of living in Moscow fell away automatically. It is almost impos-
sible to convey to people who have not experienced it on their
own flesh and nerves the hardships of transportation in Russia,
just as one cannot convey the reality of the housing situation. It
was fitting that a few years later the construction of a gaudy sub-
way in Moscow (though it had no perceptible effect in solving
the transportation problem) should be raised to a symbol of the
glories-to-come.

I was the last of the working foreign newspapermen to acquire
a car, partly because I could not convince my bosses in New York
to pay for one; even more so because I felt it faintly disreputable
to drive around in public view while Muscovites fought for a
foothold on the rims of tramcars. To the very end of my stay it
seemed to me a little like flaunting one’s health by doing hand-
springs in a hospital for cripples. I was not alone in this senseless
self-consciousness; I know other foreigners who harbored a sense
of guilt in publicly enjoying advantages which Soviet officials
enjoyed without blinking an eyelid.

4

Soviet newspapers that winter were writing a great deal about
an “aero-sled” of domestic invention. A motor-driven sled with a
rear propeller, it was said to achieve a speed of some two hun-
dred kilometers an hour on flat snow-covered ground. .Ever en-
thusiastic over new mechanical toys, Russians foresaw an important
future for this invention in covering immense spaces in the winter-
time for purposes of commerce and in the event of war.

One day all foreign correspondents were invited to a demon-
stration of the aero-sled. Must of us accepted. It was one of those
Russian days when the frost seems to be a ferocious beast lurk-
ing outside your door, ready to snap its teeth shut on your nose.
But we bundled up and rode to the very end of a car-line, and
there found a group of Soviet officials, and the engineer-inventor
of the propeller sled. Having inspected the two sleds and inter-
viewed the inventor, we were offered rides.

DISILLUSIONMENT

446

In batches of three or four, we crowded into the open sleds.
At two hundred kilometers an hour, in a cold about thirty be-
low zero, the drive was no picnic. Always demons for speed,
and now intent upon demonstrating their new toy, the Russian
chauffeurs forgot all caution, or perhaps never had known it.
They darted into the open fields with the speed of arrows, flash-
ing around an occasional stone or tree, while those who watched,
including confirmed atheists, prayed for the passengers. A few of
the foreigners had the courage of their doubts and declined the
ride. It takes a brave man to admit fear, and my own valor did
not suffice.

I climbed into the aero-sled, buried myself as deeply as I could
in my clothes and waited for the worst to happen. For three or
four minutes I found out what it would be like to ride a torpedo.
It was with a feeling of deep and heart-warming relief that I
stepped out. On the way home I found that all the others had the
identical feeling.

Three days later a black-bordered item in all the newspapers
announced the death of the engineer-inventor and several others.
Even before we had reached the warmth of our homes, the men we
had interviewed were dead. Having disposed of the correspond-
ents, they piled into the sleds for another ride, were smashed
up and most of them killed.

IV. Gold Mining in Torture Chambers

THE miracle o£ white bread: crisp little loaves in a glowing heap
on the Torgsin counter. Not the sand-gray bread that passed, at
double prices, for white in the ruble stores, but luminously real.
At the other end of the long angular shop was the jewelry de-
partment. Its litter of rubies and diamonds for foreign buyers
had not half the radiance of the white loaves 5 precious stones
shine with a cold inner glitter, whereas white loaves are prisms
to reflect fascination in the eyes of hungry Russians. There was
butter, too, and cheeses, bland Volga salmon and great flanks of
blood-dripping meat. But the white bread outshone them all —
at once substance and symbol of desire.

Russians moved shyly in the glow of that miracle, as though
in an art gallery. They spoke softly, placatingly, to the clerks,
and asked for prices in apologetic tones. This was the one shop
where trade was encouraged, because it was paid for in valuta.
But the habit of meekness in buying, fixed by these years of
shortage, was strong upon them. They remained grateful for the
right to buy and self-conscious when their purchases seemed too
large.

The shop windows of Torgsin were the most exciting episode in
Moscow’s life since the demise of Nep. The announcement of the
Five Year Plan had not caused nearly so much talk, so much
envy, so many daydreams. Commissar Ordzhonikidze’s figures
for heavy industry in the second quarter of the third year of the
Plan were for economists and professional communists. But the
shimmering bread loaves set in a windowful of other foodstuffs,
the fashionable shoes and shirtwaists and chic hats — these were
for Ivan, Stepan, and Marusya, who stood spellbound for long
minutes.

A peremptory doorman kept the rabble out. With one hand
he opened the door obsequiously for foreigners and well-dressed
Russians, while with the other he shooed off the ragged peasants

447

DISILLUSIONMENT

448

and poorly dressed workers. Ok, you couldn’t fool him! One
look and he knew a valuta customer. If your dress was unprepos-
sessing, you must exhibit the proofs of valuta: an actual foreign
banknote, a gold coin, a credit slip in foreign denominations.

Torgsin was started solely for commerce with resident for-
eigners and tourists, to gather in their dollars before the half-
illicit currency bootleggers got them. The word Torgsin, in fact,
is an abbreviation for “trade with foreigners. 77 But some financial
genius (several claimed credit for the idea) suggested to the
government that many Russians, too, possess valuta, and that
others had friends and relatives abroad who would send them
valuta once a place to spend it was provided. The store was there-
fore opened late in 1931 to all the lucky ones and its business
instantly skyrocketed. Additional Torgsins were opened in other
parts of the city, then in other cities, and soon its network of
stores, its mail order business, its foreign, package business, turned
Torgsin into the most lucrative trading organization in the land.
The Kremlin had discovered the “internal foreign market, 77 and
was to exploit it until 1936.

Prices were reckoned in rubles, but payment was accepted only
in the gold equivalent. Those who had actual foreign money paid
directly and got their change either in a handful of assorted cur-
rencies, or in a credit slip. Others took their gold — tsarist coins,
spoons, trinkets, wedding rings, old dental plates — to an assay
counter, obtaining a credit slip in return. Russians receiving money
from abroad got their Torgsin credits directly from the bank.
Later, special Torgsin coupons in many denominations were is-
sued to facilitate the business, and became, in effect, a superior
currency, from thirty to sixty times more valuable than the of-
ficial currency.

Though the authorities sought to assure people that no ques-
tions would be asked, and no record of their identity made, Rus-
sians entered the place with beating hearts, many of them only
when driven by hunger or despair. They feared secret arrest if
branded as persons possessing valuta. And, in fact, despite the
assurances, the G.P.U. kept a sharp look-out and got thousands
of its “leads” to valuta owners through Torgsin. More cautious
or less naive Russians (unless their money came from abroad
through the banks) did not venture into the Torgsin. Dozens of

GOLD MINING IN TORTURE CHAMBERS 449

times Billy and I, like every other foreigner, made purchases for
Russians who dared not call attention to their pitiful affluence
by entering the place.

Nevertheless, millions of dollars were collected for the gov-
ernment’s coffers every month. Millions of rubles in tsarist gold
pieces, it appeared, were still in private possession, and these now
rolled in turbulent streams into the Torgsin stores, chiefly in ex-
change for food. The choicest products in the land — white flour,
fruit, canned food, cotton goods, etc. — were diverted to the valuta
emporia. After some months the flood of gold subsided, and Torg-
sin began to accept silver. Mountains of silver tableware, trinkets,
picture frames — things snatched somehow from the maw of revo-
lution and treasured these fifteen years — were gathered. Still later,
when the silver had been drawn off, precious stones were added
to the media of exchange, and finally any other valuables (furs,
pictures, icons, antiques) which had a ready market abroad.

In working this “internal foreign market,” the government
was as conscienceless as the most heartless pawn-broker. Acute
shortage and semi-starvation had destroyed the Russian’s sense of
value. Gratefully, he gave the government his last silver cup for
a few pennies’ worth of butter, his wedding ring for a lemon,
a diamond for a few pairs of stockings. I remember calculating the
cost of a series of Torgsin items in silver and learning that a pair
of shoes cost twice its weight in silver. A hundred dollars sent
by an American relative bought perhaps ten or twenty dollars’
worth of goods. The government robbed its citizens twice in one
transaction — first in its arbitrary valuation of the proffered jewels
or other valuta, and then in its steep prices. Meanwhile, the secret
agent stood in his corner marking off victims for the final kill by
the Valuta Department of the G.P.U.

Only a few of Russia’s teeming millions, of course, could have
any dealings with Torgsin. For the rest, these stores filled with
food luxuries only emphasized the general poverty. At moments
of sharpened shortage, when food rations were reduced and prices
raised, the Torgsin windows in every large city of Russia must
have seemed deliberate mockery.

To a foreigner it was inexplicable that the obvious resentments
never boiled over in violent action. In the center of famine dis-
tricts in the Ukraine in 1933, when wagons went around collecting

450 DISILLUSIONMENT

the day’s corpses, Torgsin windows flaunted bread and butter
and sausage, and it occurred to none of the starving to smash
the windows and seize another day of life. In any "Western city
there would have been riots $ the brow-beaten, bovine Russians
merely stared and sighed and suffered. Had the Soviet people
had a spark of real rebelliousness in their make-up, the revolution
would inevitably have taken a different course. It was, paradoxi-
cally, the absence of the revolutionary instinct upon which the
Russian revolution rested. Opposition, when it did assert itself,
was negative in character — a sullen, do-nothing non-cooperation
such as was now spreading among the peasantry , and isolated, un-
organized acts of desperation. . .

The stifled laughter filled with tears quickly took Torgsin into
its orbit. Jokes about these stores multiplied. One of them carica-
tured the usurious prices. A young husband, it went, wishing to
present his bride with some unusual gift, took his one silver spoon
to Torgsin and obtained a credit slip for twenty-three kopeks.
In vain he searched for an item within that figure. Finally he
went to the director of the shop. “I have twenty-three gold
kopeks,” he said, “and want to know what I can buy for it.”
The kindly director looked through his price lists and after a
while exclaimed cheerfully: “There it is! Exactly twenty-three
kopeks — one aluminum spoon.”

The most popular and biting anecdote of all had it that there
was a special room in every Torgsin where, for a fat fee in valuta,
you were allowed to sing the old Russian national hymn, God-
Save the Tsar! The implication, of course, was that the Kremlin
was selling its revolutionary ideals for gold.

2

Words have a life of their own, overtones of meaning and
depths of emotion, that no dictionary definition can convey. The
Russian Revolution has thrown many words into sharp relief,
charged them with intimate significances unintelligible to strangers.
Words like kulak, vredityel (wrecker), udarnik (shock-brigadier),
liquidatsiya (liquidation), have their individual careers; a literal
translation may give their body but no indication of their soul. .

But of all the words lifted to eminence none can compare with

GOLD MINING IN TORTURE CHAMBERS 45 I

valuta y syllables electric with wonder and with danger. By 1931,
all the works o£ Marx and Lenin, all the speeches of Kaganovich
and Kalinin, were outweighed in the scales of Russian conscious-
ness by this one word. Valuta shops, valuta restaurants, valuta ar-
rests, valuta tortures, valuta whores: just a few dimensions of that
inexhaustible word. To record that it means “real values,” such
as foreign money, precious metals and jewels, does not begin
to explain it.

The revolution that was to free the human spirit from its
economic fetters began, perhaps unavoidably, by concentrating all
its attention on those fetters, reducing all mortal values to the
common denominator of economics. Industrialization under Stalin
carried that simplification to paranoiac extremes, scrapping its so-
cialist conscience, every shred of humaneness, for economic values:
production, factories, canals, mines, shimmering statistics. And
the common element in all of those was valuta. Valuta bought ma-
chines and brains, arms and munitions, all the essentials that cheap
labor alone could not obtain. Valuta was the concept of money
refined to its quintessential core of pure hard value.

The world economic depression heightened the importance of
valuta by reducing the income from Soviet exports. In the first
half of 1931, for instance, the country sent out more goods, by
754,000 tons, than in the same months of the preceding year, but
received for it $6 3,730,000 less in money. The government’s des-
perate yearning for valuta began to blot out all lesser appetites.

The entire tourist business was placed strictly on a valuta basis,
and the main hotels, catering to foreigners, were put on a foreign
currency footing. Taxis and such other services as could con-
veniently be withheld from foreigners if they did not pay in some
currency other than rubles were put in the valuta category.

The central symbol of the valuta-snaring fever seemed to me
the Hotel Metropole, now remodeled to match the Russian con-
ception of foreign taste. The perspiring musicians in their marble
tower at the Grand Hotel, still grinding away at Hallelujah ,
saw the foreign ingredient in the gala night audiences dwindle
to almost nothing. The Metropole was the new social center for
the bourgeois colony. Its main restaurant was a Russian peasant’s
dream of capitalist splendors — immense candelabra, oversized
lights, heavy furniture, a jazz band of symphony orchestra propor-

452 DISILLUSIONMENT

tions. The place always made me think of the Grand Central Sta-
tion turned into a Rotarian banquet hall. The chief pride of the
restaurant, its ultra-bourgeois touch, was a great circular pool
where lights and rather proletarian-looking fishes played. On
grand occasions, the chef in cap and apron emerged from his sanc-
tum with a net over his shoulder and captured a fish for a special
valuta client. The dancing couples rotated around the pool, and
sometimes an unsteady customer joined the fishes to the great
delight of the assembled crowd.

That restaurant was a lonesome and rococo bourgeois island in
the limitless ocean of Bolshevism. Gypsy music was forbidden
throughout the land, but a large gypsy chorus was salvaged from
the social garbage heap and installed here to entertain the valuta
guests. It was a very fine chorus, too, if a bit out of practice.

In the beginning, admission was restricted to valuta-paying
customers, which, in effect, meant foreigners earning non-Soviet
wages and willing to squander them on the fantastic Metropole
price scale. The island was very scantily patronized. I remember
evenings when a jazz band of twenty men and a gypsy chorus of
thirty-odd did their stuff for an audience of four or five couples.
A gloomier and more depressing place can scarcely be imagined
outside a cemetery or a prison.

After a few months of this pathetic emptiness, the hall was
opened to the Russian citizenry, or that portion which could pay
five rubles* for a plate of borsch and twenty-five rubles* for
a portion of chicken. Two menus were available, one in dollars, the
other in rubles. On the dollar menu, the same soup could be had
for 15 cents and the same chicken for 85 cents. Russians were
handed, as a matter of course, the ruble bill-of-fare. Foreigners
were asked pointedly whether they wished the dollar menu. The
difference was not alone in price, but in service. For a valuta
customer, the very circumambient air changed its flavor; the
waiters, old-timers with tender memories of tsarist banquets and
grand-ducal tips, instantly became more ingratiating, the soup came
warmer and the chicken more succulent. White bread, of course,

* The official rate at this time was about 1 ruble 13 kopeks to the dollar; the
unofficial rate in general use, acknowledged by the government in these valuta
and non- valuta menus, was from 30 to 50 rubles to the dollar; for the average
Russian, of course, 5 rubles was the equivalent of a day’s labor.

GOLD MINING IN TORTURE CHAMBERS 453

was served to dollar clients only, and the bar (high stools, foot-
rail, highly rouged barmaids, amiable bartender, and all the trim-
mings even unto soggy potato chips) was open to valuta-payers
only. Even the Russians who had the wherewithal and the boldness
to visit the Metropole never dared enter the barroom, the oc-
cupants of which looked into the main room as though from a
distant hilltop. . . .

The piece-work system, higher payment for technical work,
and a slight release in the tension under which intellectuals lived,
tended to enlarge the Metropole’s clientele. With the abandon-
ment of the unbroken work week, and the establishment of a uni-
form day of rest every sixth day, pered-vikhodnoy , “the eve of
the free day,” became the big night at the hotel. Whatever re-
mained of fashion and affluence in the capital congregated here
every sixth night for a big feed, vigorous dancing, and a brief re-
lease from drabness. For the Russians who could safely indulge it,
an evening at the Metropole was the next best thing to a trip
abroad. What if the place was honeycombed with spies, marking
off (for a little intimate interrogation sooner or later) the big
spenders and those too chummy with foreigners? What if one
evening’s entertainment cost a week’s wages? What if it called for
a little discreet embezzling of official funds, an offense soon made
punishable by death? There were enough Russians risking it to
crowd the bourgeois island to capacity.

Yet another device for raising valuta was soon developed, which
to this day is netting the Soviet government a handsome profit.
My dispatch announcing the innovation described it as “the ex-
port of human beings to help balance the foreign trade budget,”
a statement which did little to endear me to the censors hearts.
I might, however, have said worse and described the process more
accurately by calling it a ransom system.

The Kremlin one day announced that Russians could buy their
way out of the Soviet land by paying a passport fee of five hun-
dred gold rubles if they were proletarians, and one thousand gold
rubles if non-proletarians. Russians who had so much valuta hid-
den away did not dare admit it, knowing that less pleasant ways of
extracting it would be employed than the issuance of a passport.
In effect, therefore, the new dispensation meant that friends and

DISILLUSIONMENT

454

relatives abroad could arrange passports for Russians by paying
the specified ransom.

The government travel bureau, Intourist, was made the chan-
nel for this unsavory transaction, and it added insult to injury
by charging a steep service fee — in valuta — for its intercession. In-
tourist offices abroad advertised their bargain sale on ransomed
Soviet citizens 5 in America, in particular, they did a brisk business,
thousands of Russian-Americans having fought in vain for years
to bring aged, decrepit, persecuted, or merely disgruntled rela-
tives out of their native land.

The Soviet authorities themselves determined whether an ap-
plicant for emigration was proletarian or not — that is to say,
whether to demand one thousand gold rubles or content themselves
with half the amount. The number among the departing citizenry
who qualified as low-price proletarians was consequently very
small. Moreover, the deposit of the ransom valuta was no guaran-
tee that the hostage would be released. The government judged
every applicant individually to decide whether he merited escape.
Anyone whose economic value at home was larger than a thousand
rubles in valuta was not allowed to leave; anyone articulate enough
to prove a possible influence for anti-Soviet propaganda was like-
wise kept at home.

Notwithstanding these limitations, the ransom system sent a
wave of hope through certain sections of the urban population,
particularly the disfranchised millions and the Jews who were
being systematically tormented by the G.P.U. on suspicion of con-
cealing valuta. In the months after this announcement, tens of
thousands of letters were sent by Russians to acquaintances and
blood relations in all parts of the capitalist world begging to be
bought out. In many instances, Russians who had the necessary
ransom money smuggled it out to acquaintances abroad, with in-
structions to make the arrangements at the nearest Intourist office.

3

These were open means of slaking the government’s thirst for
valuta. Beyond them, furtive and sinister, talked of in whispers
even among foreigners who had nothing to fear personally, was

GOLD MINING IN TORTURE CHAMBERS 455

the organized extortion of valuta by a special division of the
G.P.U.

I approach the subject fearfully, because the hurt of it is fresh
and raw on ray mind, and because I realize that the reader will
find it hard to believe me. No other episode in the entire his-
tory of the revolution has been so carefully and so successfully
hidden from the world. To write about it is to touch moral slime.
But the valuta tortures did more to color and toughen my reac-
tion against the Bolshevik way than any other single element in
my experience; a record of the experience that omitted or slurred
over that element would falsify the whole narrative.

Long before I learned the details of the process, I heard casual
and veiled references to the “sweat room,” the “lice room,” the
“conveyor,” “cold treatments,” and other refined tortures. I heard
them from the lips of boastful G.P.U. agents whose tongues had
been loosened by too much vodka, in half-ribald allusions here
and there, in political jokes whose full import I did not gather
at the time. The first specific incidents came to my notice late in
1930. An acquaintance who showed up after a period of unex-
plained disappearance gave me under pledge of absolute secrecy
a hair-raising account of his ordeal. He had been arrested on sus-
picion of possessing dollars, and had been put through revolting
forms of torture before he convinced his tormentors that the sus-
picion was unfounded.

“I envied those who really had something they could give
away,” he told me. “They held out for a week or two, then they
confessed where the stuff was hidden and they were through. But
I had no thin g to confess, so I remained on and on for months.
‘You’re lying! Where is it?’ they bellowed at me; ‘back to the
-par ilka! Back to the conveyor! We can wait until you make up
your mind!’ I don’t know how I survived it.”

The worst of it, he said, was that he was still under suspicion,
and might be returned to that purgatory any minute. From several
other directions I got substantially the same story. One woman
after a few days of torment gave up a gold watch and other
trinkets which were gifts from her dead husband. “Even when
the children were without bread,” she said, “I did not sell them.
They seemed to me a part of my dear Kolya. Now they’ve sweated
them out of me, the fiends! the robbers!” Those who were made

456 DISILLUSIONMENT

to disgorge signed formal statements in grandiloquent language
“contributing” their valuta to “help the Five Year Plan.” Whether
they had anything to bequeath to the Plan or not, they were
warned never to mention to anyone, not even their families, what
they had seen and suffered, on pain of being returned to the tor-
ture chambers.

I could not bring myself to believe that the heads of the G.P.U.
and the heads of the Communist Party knew about such things or
countenanced them. Only as the evidence piled up, month after
month and year after year, was I driven to recognize that the prac-
tice was nation-wide, deliberate and systematized. In the end I
came to know the conduct of the “gold mining” department of the
G.P.U. in all the ripeness of its corruption.

The extortions went under the euphemism of “mobilization of
hidden valuta resources,” and were, in effect, an unwritten ad-
junct of the Five Year Plan. “Income” from that source was ear-
marked for specific valuta obligations of the Kremlin. Like any
other branch of the economic apparatus, the G.P.U. had its “con-
trol figures” for the year: a rigid plan or commitment to extract
specific sums from the population. Every regional and local branch
was assigned a quota and no questions were asked about the argu-
ments used to persuade gold-bearing citizens to “contribute.” If
a few people died of suffocation or pain, if most of the unfortu-
nates were broken physically for life, if the minds of men and
women snapped — well, slag and dross were to be expected in any
ambitious mining operation.

The human ore for G.P.U. smelting was gathered from many
groups and classes, and ranged from servant girls with a single
gold piece in their possession to former millionaires with caches
of jewels. Nepmen and pre-revolutionary merchants who might
logically have salted away remnants of their former opulence.
Jewelers, watch-makers, dentists, others whose trades in freer
days made it likely that they had saved leavings and scourings
of gold. Outstanding professional men and women— physicians,
engineers, writers, etc. — known to have earned large sums during
the years when the ruble was stable and legally convertible into
other currencies. Persons whose standard of living was above their
visible sources of income. Above all, Russians who had been re-

GOLD MINING IN TORTURE CHAMBERS 457

ceiving remittances from relatives in America and other coun-
tries.

Besides its own sensitive nose for valuta, the G.P.U. depended
upon anonymous denunciations and denunciations under pressure;
the Valuta Department assumed shrewdly that anyone having
foreign money would probably know others similarly cursed, and
drew that information from him along with his cash contribu-
tion to the fiatiletka. As far as possible, it sought to make its
eveiy victim a spy as well, often as the price of personal immunity
to further “mining.” An acquaintance in Kharkov had been on the
valuta rack three times at intervals of a month or two. He seemed
to have grown twenty years older in the year since I had seen
him; his cheeks had fallen in and his hands trembled. Had he
been ill? I asked. “Worse, much worse,” he said, “but let’s not
talk about it.” And Russian-wise he proceeded to talk for hours;
every moment of his weeks in the torture chambers were sharply
etched in his memory.

“The first two times,” he said, “I gave them money. But the
third time I had no more to give. And God knows when I will
be called again. I can no longer sleep or eat or work” — he held
a fairly responsible job in the food trust — “just waiting for the
horror to begin again. They have made me an offer. They will
let me alone, but at a terrible price, as terrible as the tortures.”

“What’s the price?”

“That I become an informer on all my friends in Kharkov! I
stand well in the Jewish community, and it’s mosdy Jews they’re
after. They think that I can smell out who has valuta and where
it is hidden, and who has rich relatives in America to be ex-
ploited. If I do that, they won’t touch me; otherwise— back to
the farilka. But I won’t do it. I’ll die first. I think of nothing
but suicide. If it weren’t for the children . . .”

The great majority of the victims were Jews, since Jews pre-
dominated among the former Nepmen and among those who re-
ceived money from American relatives.

“Do you think the thing is an expression of anti-Semitism?” I
asked one victim, a highly intelligent Jewish physician.

“No, I think not,” he said. “They pick up non-Jews just as
readily. It simply happens that our race is hardest hit by the
valuta arrests. On the other hand, there is no doubt at all that the

458 disillusionment

G.P.U. agents in charge of this work are deeply anti-Semitic and
do their dirty work with great enjoyment. They’re Black Hun-
dred men and pogromshchiks at heart, and the word zhid is al-
ways on their tongues, along with all the other filth, in terrorizing
the valuta suspects. Zhid, parasite, zhidovskaya morda are com-
monplaces in the yelling and cursing along the conveyor.”

Once I was told how a patriarchal Jew held in Moscow as a
valuta suspect was forced by jeering torturers to drink his own
urine. I have never been able to erase that ghastly image from
my mind. At the most unlikely moments — listening to Premier
Molotov in the Kremlin Palace, going through some model Soviet
institution, listening to the hallelujahs of some American enthusiast
for Bolshevism — this image had a way .of obtruding itself. What
were all the statistical boasts and models and enthusiasms against
the gray-bearded old man choking on his own urine— in the four-
teenth year of the revolution, with the strongest government on
the face of the earth in charge of the obscenity!

On the day I heard this story, from a person whose honesty I
could not doubt, I turned to the famous passage in Brothers
Karamazov, where Dostoievsky discusses sadistic cruelty through
the mouth of Ivan Karamazov. I underlined the passage where
Ivan, speaking to his brother Alyosha, says:

“Tell me yourself, I challenge you, answer! Imagine that you are
creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men
happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but it was essen-
tial and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature — that
baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance — and to found that
edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect
on those conditions? Tell me, and tell me the truth.”

“No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly.

4

When I write of tortures, I use the word in its literal sense.
There was moral degradation, the erasure of all human dignity and
self-respect — the entire system was nicely calculated to reduce
the strongest men and women, whether janitors or celebrated pro-
fessors, to the common level of slobbering fear. “You just for-
get that you’re human, that there are still people who are not

GOLD MINING IN TORTURE CHAMBERS 459

wild beasts, that somewhere sometimes you heard of music and
poetry and civilization,” one woman tried to explain it to me.

But the basic mechanism and chief reliance of the extortion
artists were physical torture. In every city the Valuta Department
might develop its own sadistic specialties, but apparently several
basic techniques were common to them all.

The farilka > or sweat room, has been described to me so often
that I feel as though I had seen it with my own eyes. I can see
it now with my mind’s eye. Several hundred men and women,
standing close-packed in a small room where all ventilation has
been shut off, in heat that chokes and suffocates, in stink that
asphyxiates, one small bulb shedding a dim light on the purgatory.
Many of them have stood thus for a day, for two days. Most of
them have ripped their clothes off in fighting the heat and the
sweat and the swarming lice that feed upon them. Their feet
are swollen, their bodies numbed and aching. They are not allowed
to sit down or to squat. They lean against one another for sup-
port, sway with one rhythm and groan with one voice. Every
now and then the door is opened and a newcomer is squeezed in.
Every now and then those who have fainted are dragged out into
the corridor, revived and thrown back into the sweat room . . .
sometimes they cannot be revived.

The so-called “conveyor” has been graphically described by
Professor Tchernavin in his book, I Sfeak for the Silent. His de-
scription coincides substantially with the accounts I have heard
myself from victims who had been through the torture. Examiners
sit at desks in a long series of rooms, strung out along corridors,
up and down stairways, back to the starting point: a sort of circle
of G.P.U. agents. The victims run at a trot from one desk to
the next, cursed, threatened, insulted, bullied, questioned by each
agent in turn, round and round, hour after hour. They weep
and plead and deny and keep running. ... If they fall they
are kicked and beaten on their shins, stagger to their feet and
resume the hellish relay. The agents, relieved at frequent in-
tervals, are always fresh and keen, while the victims grow weaker,
more terrorized, more degraded.

From the farilka to the conveyor, from the conveyor to the
farilka y then periods in ugly cells when uncertainty and fear for
one’s loved ones outside demoralize the prisoner . . . weeks of

460 disillusionment

this while the "hidden valuta resources” are being "mobilized”
by the G.P.U. in a thousand cities o£ the socialist fatherland. I am
aware of my impotence to translate more than a hint of the
Gehenna into words. One must hear it from the mouth of a hag-
gard, feverish victim fresh from the ordeal to grasp the hellish-
ness of it.

If physical torture failed to break down someone who, the
G.P.U. was convinced, actually had a lot of valuta, members of
his family were brought in and tortured under his eyes. I heard
the detailed story of a former merchant who insisted for weeks
that he had nothing, absolutely nothing left. Only when one of
his children, a little boy, was thrown into the farilka with him and
kept there for three days did he remind himself that he did have
a box of jewels buried in his back yard. Then another child was
brought for torture, and he admitted to more valuta in another
hiding place. His whole family was on the rack before he was
stripped clean of his surreptitious wealth.

A Russian-American businessman came as a tourist to visit his
aged parents in Kiev. For years he had been sending them a
monthly remittance, which was their only support. Completely
distressed by the squalid poverty in which his father and mother
lived, he tried in vain to arrange for them to leave the country ;
this was before the valuta ransom racket was inaugurated. He did
the next best thing and found them a better room to live in by
paying American dollars to the trust which controlled the tene-
ment house. He outfitted them at Torgsin and paid for large
stocks of food. And before departing he left them four or five
hundred dollars in cash.

That gift was tantamount to a sentence of torture for the father.
No sooner had his son left than the old man was dragged away
to the torture chambers. He immediately relinquished the few
hundred dollars. The very alacrity with which he did it convinced
the agents that it could not be all, that he must have more than
he admitted. (Seasoned victims knew the danger of yielding too
soon and thereby exciting the doubts and cupidity of their tor-
mentors; one victim warned another to take the medicine of tor-
ture before capitulating if he wanted to be believed.) So he was
kept for weeks, and for at least a year to my personal knowledge

GOLD MINING IN TORTURE CHAMBERS 46 1

was taken in custody at regular intervals for another installment
o£ “persuasion.”

A routine practice was to force Soviet citizens to write to
relatives abroad begging for large sums of money. The letters,
dictated by the G.P.U., usually made frantic appeals for specified
amounts, explaining vaguely that it was “a matter of life and
death.” When the money arrived, it was, of course, instantly
“contributed” to the Five Year Plan. Jews in particular were
subjected to this racket on the theory that blood ties are strong in
Jewish families and a tragic plea for cash would not be ignored
by well-off American sons and uncles.

As late as the summer of 1934, when I was working in Holly-
wood, a Russian emigre came to see me. For years, he explained,
he had been receiving strange, almost incoherent, requests for
money from a brother in a certain Soviet city. He could afford it
and did not grudge the money, but he was mystified by the secrecy
with which his brother surrounded the vague matter of life and
death that needed periodical sums to save him. He showed me
one of the missives and I recognized it instantly as a typical G.P.U.
extortion letter.

5

In the sum total of anguish incident upon the revolution, the
valuta episode may not bulk large. Its victims must be counted
by the tens of thousands, while those of liquidation, concentration
camps, and man-made famine run into millions. But its cruelty
was naked and unprovoked, without a shadow of “revolutionary”
rationalization, its victims drawn from all classes. None of the
stock alibis for brutality applied: a dictatorial state merely cap-
tured its subjects secretly and bled them white for a paltry few
million dollars. There was not even the formality of a decree to
sanctify the procedure; the victims with jew exceptions had come
by their valuta legally , and even under the Soviet law had every
right to it; the hocus-pocus of a “voluntary contribution” through
torture somehow added depths of ugliness to the ghastly business.

In Dostoievsky’s imagined torture of a child, it was assumed
to be “essential and inevitable” in creating a noble fabric of human
destiny. It is this unavoidable necessity that apologists for official
Sckrecklichkeit , whether under Bolshevism or fascism, urge to

DISILLUSIONMENT

462

excuse brutality. But the planned torture for valuta cannot easily
be twisted to appear essential and inevitable. It achieved nothing
except to hasten the collection of a few million dollars, most of
which would have come into the coffers of the state anyhow sooner
or later, though more slowly, through Torgsin and other non-
violent methods of collection. The private robber and highway-
man takes certain chances— the law may catch up with him. This
lawlessness by the Bolshevik state lacked even that redeeming
feature of sportsmanship. Its perpetrators worked with impunity.

Socialist thinking had always placed human life above property.
Now the Kremlin was placing property far above human life.
The net proceeds of its steam rooms and conveyors and exotic
inquisitions probably did not suffice to pay for one more factory
in the hundreds erected.

It was because of the starkness of this episode, its apparently
frivolous exercise of a talent for inflicting pain, its offhand indul-
gence of an appetite for the macabre, that the Soviet authorities
guarded this secret more desperately than any other. From 1931
forward, it was the most gruesome and shameful of the skeletons
in the Kremlin’s closet. Some of the foreign correspondents knew
more about the valuta tortures than others, depending on the
extent of their contact with Russians ; but not one was totally
ignorant of it. A thousand times we talked about it among our-
selves. It was the supreme taboo in a land teeming with political
taboos. For a correspondent to write about it would have amounted
to open declaration of war against his official hosts 5 and probably
futile, since he would not only elicit violent official denials but
would very likely be let down by his colleagues.

Our reticence was deepened by the fear of getting Russians
close to us into trouble. (Even in writing this chapter, far off in
time and in space from the Moscow of the early thirties, I am
constrained to edit myself carefully to protect Russians 3 I omit
tell-tale details in the dread that they may point toward my
sources of information.) The nearest I came to touching the sub-
ject — the only time, I believe, that the subject was even hinted at
by any American correspondent while on Soviet soil — was in a
general article about a new wave of arrests. Having listed many
varieties of victims, I added that “there is a category of arrests

GOLD MINING IN TORTURE CHAMBERS 463

never mentioned in the press / 5 namely, valuta suspects ; and that
they “are held under conditions none too pleasant 55 until they
agree to part with their valuta. The article was published in the
New York Herald Tribune , and in dozens of other papers. But
only the Jewish Daily Forward of New York understood the hint,
picked up the seemingly casual sentence and made it the basis of
an editorial.

Only the Jewish press of the world, in fact, seemed aware of the
valuta horrors. An international Jewish committee, headed by the
Hebrew poet, Bialik, had gathered hundreds of letters smuggled
out by Russians to relatives abroad giving harrowing details of
their experiences in torture chambers.

None of the standardized alibis for brutality, as I have said,
suffice to explain, let alone explain away, the valuta episode. It
could have happened only under a regime which had lost even
the memory of respect for human life and suffering; one in which
the guinea-pig theory of humanity as inert raw stuff for experi-
mental purposes has conquered all natural instincts. It was a symp-
tom of something pathological: whether the atrophy of the in-
stinct of human compassion, or worse — a positive relish for in-
flicting pain.

The suspicion that a sort of collective sadism had been evoked
in Russia by long years of brutality, ripened in my mind. It made
explicable for me aspects of the revolution which otherwise were
baffling. That the brutality may at times have been Essential and
inevitable , 55 or forced upon the regime in its struggle for power,
makes little difference so far as the fact itself is concerned. I saw
the pathological streak dignified in the official rhetoric as “Bol-
shevik firmness 55 or “Stalinist ruthlessness . 55 I saw it reflected in
the semi-official apologetics of foreigners who found it in their
conscience to treat the vast network of concentration camps as an
“industrial 55 enterprise and an “educational institution 55 without
so much as a suspicion that their emotional arteries were hope-
lessly hardened.

I could never again completely drive out of my own mind the
gnawing awareness of the valuta tortures as long as I was in
Russia. They remained in the background of my consciousness to
cast their shadow on the industrial triumphs about which I wrote

DISILLUSIONMENT

464

every day. The thought that only a few blocks away, on Liubianka
Square, men were gasping in the farilka or staggering on the con-
veyor was under the surface of my mind: the counterweight to
all the boasts and promises and revolutionary pretensions that
filled the press, the billboards, the speeches, and the plans.

V. Culture in a Straitjacket

COVERING a “beat” the size of the Soviet Union single-hand-
edly for a high-powered American press association against ener-
getic competition, induces a fellow-feeling for ancient galley
slaves, not untinged with envy. It is no job for a lazy man.
Stories might break in any of the twenty-four hours or all of
them. They didn’t, of course 5 but the mere possibility kept you
forever tethered to a telephone in nervous expectancy. You might
be watching a ballet, flirting with a ballerina, or competing with
a Russian in the annihilation of vodka and 'zakuski — but never with
all your mind and senses. Part of you was tensed to spring when
that impending story broke. Denying the dispatches of your col-
leagues took as much labor as working up your own mistakes — but
was much more fun. It became second nature to scan the talk
and the faces around you for hints of news.

Right on the stage in Moscow, in magnificently distorted ver-
sions of American plays like Front Page and Chicago , handsome
newspapermen careened adventurously, living and loving and
cussing at high tension 3 by all fictional indices, foreign correspon-
dents, in particular, lived expansively and dangerously. But here
we were, perspiring and unromantic. We chewed the cud of our
daily statistics, adventured among Five Year Plan percentages,
and hacked our way heroically through the jungles of interminable
speeches. Digging through the day’s newspapers, which is the
larger half of a Moscow correspondent’s job, was about as thrill-
ing as digging ditches. The daily doses of economic and political
facts would shape up as exciting history in the perspective of
time, and some had the skill to inject a premonition of that ex-
citement into current dispatches. But on the whole they made a
dull enough routine.

My own deep concern with the meanings of economic and polit-
ical developments, luckily, invested the routine with a good deal
of intellectual excitement. I felt a little as though I were watching

465

'466 DISILLUSIONMENT

a tense chess game, even if the moves were painfully slow. But
there were among us newspapermen who neither knew nor cared
for that sort of chess: alert police reporters in search of spot news,
sensations, front-page stuff. Their frustration and boredom were
sad to behold. The swashbuckling correspondent was quickly re-
duced to quiescence by the censorship and the lack of anything
worth swashbuckling over.

One moved carefully, fearfully, between the Scylla of exacting
editors and the Charybdis of the Russian Press Department, with
an eye always alert for the maneuvers of competing correspondents.
One sweated to trace down a piece of news, then sweated some
more to convoy it safely past the rocks where Charybdis-Umansky
belched the waters of his idealogical wrath. Terse inquiries from
home reported sensations about Russia, emanating from Moscow
itself or neighboring capitals, and ended with the one word,
“How? ”. You didn’t know “how,” probably never would know
“how”; the reporters who started the sensation themselves didn’t
know “how.” The censors whom you woke out of their sleep or
disturbed at their tea drinking, you were well aware, would not
know “how,” and would not confide in you if they did know.

Or equally terse orders demanded immediately the “official re-
action” to some international event. The nearest you got to the
Kremlin was, most likely, a sleepy censor in a shabby bathrobe,
and he figured in the resultant dispatch as “official circles” or “high
quarters” or “sources close to the government.” Usually these
one-man circles and sources “expressed astonishment” or “made
vigorous denials” or “refused to dignify the report by a formal
denial.”

All these things taken together kept one busy enough. My
days were crowded with work, my nights rarely uninterrupted by
urgent “hows” and untimely summonses from the Foreign Office.
The interstices of leisure were amply filled with sacred and pro-
fane activities ranging from dancing or stud poker to symphony
concerts or theater, though which were sacred and which profane
I shall not attempt to decide here.

I record these facts lest I have left a false impression that I
spent all my time bewailing the fate of Marxism in Russia. An
emotional experience distilled in a chapter or two of summary,
of course, sounds more intense than the original experience spread

CULTURE IN A STRAITJACKET 467

over years and diluted by the million diversions o£ everyday exist-
ence. Firewood for that huge and omnivorous oven in our kitchen
and a supply of American cigarettes claimed precedence over the
horrors of Solovyetsky or the glories of Magnitostroi. For my
Russian neighbors, too, the chores of daily life overshadowed the
larger Soviet problems about which books (including this one)
are written.

Once upon a time, living under the capitalist system which I
despised and which I labored earnestly to overthrow, I had man-
aged to wring a full measure of personal satisfaction out of each
day notwithstanding. Now, living under the hammer and sickle
and profoundly aware of social facts which distressed me, I man-
aged likewise to find personal joys and amusements notwithstand-
ing. Between work and play, both of which I relish, I had small
margin of time left for making melancholy faces at myself in the
mirror of my thoughts.

My deepening disapproval of the Bolshevik way certainly can-
not be attributed to personal discomforts. With a big house, a car,
servants, an American salary and the innumerable privileges at-
taching to my status as a correspondent, we lived on a level con-
siderably higher than ever before, and pretty thoroughly insulated
against the physical shocks of Soviet conditions. Far from being
roused to resentment by living conditions, a foreign correspondent
was more likely to be lulled into conformity. The environment of
general poverty and shortage, whatever its moral effects, made our
plane of existence seem even higher than it was. Foreigners with
jobs maintained standards that, relatively speaking, compared with
a life of affluence in the outside world.

2

I tried to follow the more significant plays, movies, books,
magazines — -but no longer with the expectation of encountering
an original thought. There might be vigor and beauty of form,
but the content was just boresome repetition of a few prescribed
and over-simplified ideas. In scientific fields where heresy hunters
found the going pretty hard — geological research, let us say, or
Arctic exploration — a spirit of bold investigation could still be
detected. But in anything that bordered on pure thought, any-

468 DISILLUSIONMENT

thing that might open vistas of scientific skepticism or might en-
courage “dangerous” curiosity, there was an intellectual reign of
terror.

What passed as history was a calculated distortion of facts to
match the latest Kremlin edicts. Anthropology must goose-step on
the policy line in relation to minority races. Psychology must be
twisted to conform to Stalinist assumptions (the whole Freudian
psychology, for example, was taboo; not because any Bolshevik
had disproved it, but because it was contrary to the “Party line”).
As to philosophy, it was more dangerous to question dialectic
materialism according to Stalin in present-day Moscow than it had
been to question the flatness of the earth in Rome of the Dark
Ages. Even in the natural sciences, there was plenty of grotesquery
about “Leninist surgery” and “Stalinist mathematics” and ideolog-
ical deviations in biology.

Intellectual life was depressed to a dead level of conformist
mediocrity. Charlatanism and mental prostitution were the easiest
paths to artistic success. In the final analysis, a thick-headed secret
service man or bureaucratic censor was judge, jury, and lord high
executioner on every product of the human mind. Suppression was
the least of this official’s weapons; he could remove scientists from
their laboratories, deny writers the privilege of print, or condemn
the intellectual culprits to exile or prison.

I was not unmindful of the successful campaign to teach people
to read and write. Elementary education for children was now
almost universal. Specialized technical education was being pushed
on a wholesale scale in speed-up style. Physical and military train-
ing was at levels undreamed of in old Russia.

For some reason, every totalitarian state hastens to teach its
subjects to read, while suppressing free thought, strait jacketing the
press, and putting its artists in uniforms. In Italy I saw the same
drives for literacy. Perhaps the maximum effectiveness of a cen-
sored press and literature requires a literate population. The need
for industrialized states to encourage technical education and for
militarist states to encourage physical prowess is self-evident. The
spokesmen of all such states seek to palm off this utilitarian edu-
cation as proof of their “culture” and progress.

An approach to genuine culture, an approximation of intellectual
liberty, however, reguire fearless creative investigation by scien-

CULTURE IN A STRAIT JACKET 469

tists; fearless creative production by artists. And such things were
unthinkable, impossible, suicidal in Russia at this time. Even in
France before the Revolution, there was a measure of relative lib-
erty — but who can imagine a Soviet Voltaire or Diderot attacking
the accepted mores of the Soviet era? Even in Russia of the tsars,
there was a measure of this liberty — but where is a Soviet Tol-
stoy or Turgenyev or Saltykov to criticize the status quo ? To dare
even to describe that status quo accurately? A Soviet writer with
one-tenth the critical boldness of a Voltaire or a Lev Tolstoy would
be lucky to escape with a ten-year term in Siberia. Tsarist censorship
was placated if the artist or thinker took a neutral attitude and
merely avoided politics. To the Soviet censor, neutrality is one of
the deadliest sins — every artist and scientist must show proof of ac-
tive support of the official dogmas. The tsars, moreover, did not
concern themselves with every sphere of intellectual and esthetic
effort from dancing to astronomy like their successors in the Krem-
lin, so that there were a few sanctuaries for man as a thinker and
an artist.

At a moment when the strain of the Piatiletka seemed almost
unbearable, Moscow was shocked by the Second Moscow Art The-
ater production of Alexei Tolstoy’s daring Peter /. In a series of
sharply etched scenes out of Peter the Great’s life, the first-night
audience saw the Bolshevik effort in historical replica. They saw
Peter imposing Western industrial methods upon a backward na-
tion against its will, contemptuous of the cost in life and resources.
They saw him driving the peasantry with a whip along new social
paths, building factories and cities with armies of forced labor.
In his very Westernism, Peter appeared most Asiatic, brutally
indifferent to the sufferings of millions of individuals in an ob-
sessed devotion to the larger destiny of the state. The non-com-
munist intelligentsia of the capital tittered inwardly, pretending
not to notice the remarkable analogy. Communists were scandal-
ized. It was generally assumed that the play would be swept off
the boards and Tolstoy disciplined. But nothing of the sort hap-
pened. Joseph Stalin himself saw the production and— another
Petrine touch! — commanded that it remain. Remain it did, a bold
political parable in the midst of rigid censorship.

The recurrent patterns in Russian history, such as this one

470 . DISILLUSIONMENT

dramatized by Alexei Tolstoy, were for me a continuous source
of amazement. Among the second-hand volumes in a Moscow
book-shop, I picked up The Mainsprings of Russia , by Maurice
Baring. In it I read of a Russian leader that “he accelerated to
an extent, which seems little short of miraculous, the natural
progress of the country} he accomplished in a few years the work
of many generations} he sketched the outlines of a gigantic plan,
which still remains to be filled in to this day} the violence and
fury with which he compelled a reluctant people to adopt his
changes had, of course, its drawbacks.”

It is not to Joseph Stalin that Baring referred, but to Peter the
Great. The book was published in 1914! It is far easier to relate
the career of Stalin to Peter than to Karl Marx.

3

At a certain point in their drinking, Pyotr and Lyova brushed
away the ornate little glasses Billy had picked up in a commission
shop, brushed them away with a gesture of disdain, and poured
the vodka into deep tumblers which they drained with one noisy
swallow. They were no longer humdrum economic officials — the
years rolled back and they were again iron Chekists back in their
Ukrainian city, dispensing death and crushing enemies. The
ecstasy of that bloody period when men killed and died and life
wasn’t worth a copper kopek was fresh in their minds.

“Remember?” Lyova exulted. “I strangled them with these
bare hands to save bullets ! My fingers are like iron pincers. Here,
feel them, Gene. . . .”

“Do I remember!” Pyotr snorted. “And the time we lined up
five of them and finished them off with one bullet . . . fell neatly,
like pushing over a row of tin soldiers, do, re, mi, fa . . .”

In his sober incarnation as a factory director, Pyotr’s hands
trembled and he seemed a little scatter-brained. But vodka had
a way of steadying his nerves and his brain. The drunker he got
the more proudly certain he was of his beautiful sobriety. He
filled the tumbler to its uttermost brim, until the surface was a
tight silken film, and he lifted it to his lips without spilling a drop.

“After the killing of our chief, Lavrov,” he said, “we ordered
the shooting of every tenth prisoner to put the fear of the Cheka

CULTURE IN A STRAIT JACKET 47 1

in their rotten hearts. Lyova was with me — -weren’t you, Lyova?
— and also Isaak Lazarovich, when we went down to the cellars.
We lined them up single £le and counted — eight, nine . . . you
. . . eight, nine . . . and you. . . . That was a girl, a Jewess.
‘But, Isaak Lazarovich,’ she wailed, ‘you wouldn’t shoot me, would
you? We were in school together, you kissed me once.’ ‘You’re a
goddam loorzhoika now,’ says Isaak. But he would have spared
her if he weren’t ashamed of being soft-hearted in our presence.
It was very funny.”

Both Pyotr and Lyova were about my own age, so that they
could scarcely have been more than twenty when they served to-
gether in the Cheka of their city. Ordinarily it was hard to imagine
them as pitiless dictators of a whole region. Lyova, in particular,
could be tender and compassionate, and he looked too much like
a poet for such sanguinary business. But when they were far gone
in liquor I no longer could doubt their melodramatic past. Some-
thing strong and sharp as steel came into their eyes: an intoxi-
cation deeper than any that resides in vodka. They were again
fanatics, avenging spirits, the relentless revolution personified.

“With these ten fingers I strangled them to save bullets,”
Lyova repeated. It was the refrain to all his alcoholic reminiscences.
The horror of windpipes cracking like eggshells in his grip had
seared his nerves.

Sometimes they retold the story of “Petrova,” a celebrated
actress of their city, and how she came to beg permission to go
to Rumania for herself and her company. She showed a letter
from a theater there, inviting them to put on a season of Russian
plays.

“We told her to go and good riddance,” Lyova said. “And how
many are there in her company of players? I asked her. ‘Twenty-
two,’ she says. ‘Twenty-two,’ Pyotr says, ‘that’s a lot, but we
Bolsheviks aren’t beasts. We don’t keep artists against their will.’
So we made out a permit.

“A week or so later all the twenty-two were having a great
party to celebrate their departure. It was in Petrova’s mansion on
the Naberzhnaya. Champagne and zakusky and roast duck. They
were clinking their glasses and weeping tears of joy because they
would be leaving Russia. The doors were locked and the windows

DISILLUSIONMENT

472

shuttered, and every now and then they all stood up and sang,
God save the Tsar!”

And in the midst of the drunken, sentimental celebration, in
the midst of the patriotic singing behind the shutters bang ! bang!
bang ! — Pyotr struck the table with his tumbler by way of illustra-
tion— a company of Chekists with drawn revolvers pushed in the
door and joined the party.

“I looked around,” Pyotr took up the narrative, “and sure
enough — there were Petrova and her husband, and twenty of the
richest men and women in the city. ‘So this is your company of
actors?’ I laughed. ‘You, Matvei Borisovich, will play Hamlet,
I suppose, or is it Boris Godunov?’ Matvei Borisovich owned the
largest department store in town. ‘And you,’ I said to another,
‘what role have you selected?’ It was very funny. We shot all
twenty-two that night, every one of them, including Petrova.

“They paid her a thousand gold rubles each to join her com-
pany and escape on the permit,” Lyova explained. “Their trunks
were marked ‘costumes’ and were filled with jewels and valuables,
and their clothes were lined with gold pieces and brilliants. But
we got wind of the trick. Petrova was a great actress, though she
was getting old. That was her last play though, and she never
got any older.”

Almost at random, Lyova and Pyotr thus reached into the
storehouse of their recollections and drew out stories of death and
terror. There were punitive expeditions to peasant villages which
had harbored White fugitives, when every man, woman and child
was slaughtered and the whole village set on fire. There were
fearful atrocities against the Reds, and a fearful vengeance wreaked
against the next batch of boorzhooyi that came to hand.

Some tim es their drunken reminiscences took them to the civil
wars. There was really no front, just guerilla fighting. A dozen
times the Whites and the Reds rolled over the city. Once the
Petliurists came and slit a lot of Jewish throats. The air was as
thick with down as though it were snowing. It was an ancient
fogrom amusement, ripping open pillows and featherbeds.

“They made our people dig their own graves and climb in and
they made their comrades cover them with earth and trample
on the graves,” Lyova said. “But we knew as many amusing tricks

CULTURE IN A STRAIT JACKET 473

as they did. And when there were not enough bullets, I strangled
them with my own hands. Remember, Petya?”

“Do I remember?” Pyotr snorted, and downed another tum-
blerful of vodka.

And as they talked I became sharply conscious of the bloody
nightmare of remembrance under the humdrum surface of Soviet
life. Pyotr, Lyova, thousands like them, old Chekists, guerilla
fighters, G.P.U. executioners, carried a staggering burden of
memories. They were pinned under the weight, hostages of their
past. They dared not question the rightness of what they had done
and suffered. Every prompting of conscience was an awesome
threat to their peace of mind, their very sanity. To doubt for a
moment the revolutionary sanctions of their cruelties — would turn
them into fiends in their own eyes.

The ordeal of these men was to live with themselves. They were
condemned to a lifetime of Bolshevik firmness. The minute they
stopped being their own heroes, the minute they stopped regard-
ing themselves as Revolutionary Fate incarnate, they would change
into monsters. The only true reassurance lay in continuing to play
the mystic role of Fate, contemptuous of individual lives. None of
my prejudices against brutality could possibly touch them.} to
admit the dignity or sanctity of life would have meant spiritual
suicide for these men — it would have turned their heroism into
sordid crime.

They must measure their acts by their own yardsticks, not mine.
The more I understood these compulsions under which such people
lived, the less I could trust them. I realized that^ their emotions
were warped, must remain warped. They were prisoners of their
memories and could not even dream of escape.

VI. Fog of Skepticism over Russia

A CRUSADE for God or country may be conducted on an empty
stomach — but not so easily a crusade for earthly goods: bread and
boots and bathtubs. Having planted its materialist faith, the Krem-
lin lacked the material things which alone can fertilize such a
faith. Therein lay the paradox of the Soviet effort. How nurture
a coldly “scientific” religion of economic improvement in the here
and now on self-abnegation and vague promises for better times
in the hereafter? Why, indeed, should a Russian drilled in eco-
nomic determinism logically be expected to accept an ascetic regi-
men of disciplined labor, food rations and unquestioning obedience?
By what right could a collective of peasants taught to glorify trac-
tors and material advancement be expected to give up the products
of the tractors for the sake of an abstract socialized future? Ac-
ceptable answers could be made only with a whip.

The groundswell of enthusiasm evoked by the launching of the
Piatiletka had fallen away to a murky trickle by the time the Plan
entered its final year in 1932. Surviving in the inflated rhetoric
of speeches, slogans and bombastic statistics, it had withered in the
heart of the Russian people. That enthusiasm, after all, had de-
rived from a naively literal reading of the official propaganda. In
the ordinary Russian’s mind it had shaped up as a short-term
investment: “We shall work hard and sacrifice for five years —
then everything will be better, freer, ampler.” But now, approach-
ing the end of the Plan, the Kremlin called upon its citizens to
contemplate the triumphs of electrification by the dim glimmer
of anemic bulbs prescribed for household use; to celebrate the
mechanization of coal-mining while a drastic reduction in fuel
rations was being enforced; to glory in the fulfillment of the oil
industry’s five-year-plan in two and a half years while freezing
on kerosene queues. A judicious selection of statistics might do for
political window-dressing, but for the population the proof of the
planned pudding was in the eating — and they weren’t eating.

474

FOG OF SKEPTICISM OVER RUSSIA 475

I watched skepticism spread like a thick wet fog over Russia,
soaking into the flesh and spirits of men and women. It chilled
the hearts of the leaders no less than of the masses. Men who
publicly spent all their time pumping up optimism, talked bitterly
in private of the planlessness of the Plan, the terrible wastage of
substance and energy, the dislocation of a national economy swol-
len in some of its limbs and shrunken in the rest. Doubts of the
efficacy of enthusiasm were expressed in a constantly greater stress
on cash rewards at one pole and harsh punishment at the other.
Technical specialists, “emancipated” after the long persecution,
now acted as consultants to half a dozen trusts at once and drew
half a dozen salaries ; high earnings were again respectable and
shrewd conniving citizens (the same breed largely which thrived
under Nep) began to prosper again. New “commercial” stores and
cafes were opened in ever larger number to stimulate the newly
enfranchised profit motives. At the same time Draconic decrees
were minted almost weekly to discipline and repress the common
workers. One of them made a single day’s absence from work
punishable by loss of job, bread book, and living space: tantamount
to a sentence of slow death.

The physical proofs of industrial growth in electric power sta-
tions, new factories, strange new machines, could not disperse the
fog of doubt. They merely spread more fundamental doubts as
to the wonder-working power of machinery. The bitter-sweet
humor of political cynicism was filled with ribaldries about milk-
ing the tractors to provide milk and mating the tractors to pro-
vide meat. The most widely repeated anecdote was the one about
a naked man on a train; when amazed and scandalized passengers
remonstrated, he seemed astonished. “But, comrades,” he said, “I
come from Minsk where we have already completed our Five
Year Plan!” Another represented President Kalinin as rebuking
workers for complaining about the lack of clothes, and suggesting
that they look at the Hottentots who live happily though nude.
“Ah,” a worker commented, “the poor Hottentots must have had
communism even longer than we.”

The leaders juggled statistics to maintain appearances, but were
themselves deeply aware of the deceptions. They boasted of “over-
fulfillment” of plans for investment, knowing that the “victory”
reflected the inflation of currency and the inordinately high cost

DISILLUSIONMENT

476

of production. They shouted hallelujah over the abolition of un-
employment, knowing full well that the swollen labor forces re-
flected the low productivity of labor.

That drain on labor resources meant, in reality, that millions
of women and young people had given up their care of the family,
or their leisure, for jobs on construction sites, in mines, and in
mills. It meant that father, mother, and all the grown children
worked where father alone formerly earned the family’s keep.
Unless carrying hods up and down ladders is an end in itself (a
theory hotly sustained by intellectuals who have never tried hod-
carrying) there was little cause for thanksgiving in the labor short-
age. The family’s total income might be greater than before, but
its total purchasing power and purchasing possibilities were gen-
erally smaller.

Meeting for the first time since 1928, the All-Union Congress
of Trade Unions this spring indicated that average annual wages
had risen from 702 rubles in 1928 to 1,101 rubles in 1931 5 and
would rise again to 1,202 rubles by the end of this year. The
average income per person, in other words, had jumped from
about 15 rubles a week to about 24 rubles. This touted “victory”
was nonsensical, of course, in the light of an inflation that reduced
the ruble in the same period from 50 cents to 3 or 4 cents — or,
making allowances for rations and other government privileges,
to 10 or 12 cents at best. It was at this time that a well-meaning
American communist who had not been in Russia since 1926 pub-
lished a thick volume on “how the Soviet worker lives,” all based
on the absurd assumption that a ruble was still 50 cents!

Exceptionally impressive achievements in isolated branches of
the national economy were not unmixed blessings. The astounding
expansion of the petroleum industry, for instance, placed an un-
due burden upon transportation facilities from which other in-
dustries naturally suffered. Completion of Dnieprostroi or some
other electric station in record time at a cost of record sacrifices
made fine editorial matter, but meant little when the plants to
use the power were not yet built. A four-fold overfulfillment of
the plan for agrarian socialization, to cite the most dismal triumph
of all, was positively disastrous, since the mechanical power for
such an area was unavailable and the animal power had been de-
stroyed in the course of forcible collectivization.

FOG OF SKEPTICISM OVER RUSSIA 477

Dramatization of individual constructions was perhaps good
politics. Turksib Railroad finished! Dnieprostroi finished! Four
blast furnaces under way in Magnitogorsk! The “Ford” factory
in Nijni-Novgorod opened as a New Year’s present to the In-
fallible Leader! But it was not necessarily good economics. In
the haste to open Turksib the small matter of repair shops to
keep it in operation was overlooked. The hurried completion of
the Nijni-Novgorod plant was followed by a total break-down
of production three months later. The blast furnaces were idle
most of the time because of faulty construction and inexpert han-
dling. In fact, the straining for political effect, for “giants” and
startling “tempos,” was responsible for much of the defective work,
diversion of materials and men from less spectacular but no less
essential jobs — a fictitious speed paid for sooner or later in acci-
dents and general dislocation. Good showmanship and good eco-
nomics do not always go together.

The neatest trick of totalitarian braggadocio was the averaging
of results. Certain industries were ahead of the plan and others
behind, so that “average” achievement was statistically satisfactory.
Such arithmetical triumphs were in sober fact economic monstrosi-
ties. One might as well say (as an American writer has pointed
out) that a cross-eyed person averaged up to normality 3 or that a
cripple with one leg overlong and the other too short averaged
all right. In a speech claiming satisfactory average progress, Stalin,
casually almost, asserted that the backwardness was to be found
in coal, steel, transportation, and the productivity of labor — as
though any major industry could function averagely when it lacked
these essentials! A factory 72% completed is quite as useless as
though it had never been started — and costs more. A machine
which does not earn its own keep by commensurately raising pro-
duction per worker and lowering unit costs is scarcely a victory,
however shiny it may be.

2

There is, it seems to me, a fundamental fallacy in systematic
sacrifice. The most dangerous people have always been those ready
to sacrifice their lives for a cause, for the first expression of that
disrespect for life is a readiness to sacrifice the lives of others. But
leaving aside such philosophical considerations, sacrifice on the

478 DISILLUSIONMENT

plane of economics is a costly form of national romanticism. Russia
sacrificed light industry for heavy industry, peace manufactures
for war manufactures, quality for quantity, food for machines, men
for statistics. But men and machines, food and productivity of
labor, quality factors as well as quantity, light industry and its
heavy brethren all depend one on the other. The integrated
economy is no stronger than its weakest link.

Sacrifice is a postponement, not a solution — the disbalance is
paid for in immediate suffering, higher costs, ultimate stalling
of the economic machine. Lack of food undermines the workers,
causes a fearsome turnover of labor, saps the morale of the people.
Lack of nails holds up house-building as surely as lack of brick.
The fantastic striving for bigger and better statistics, at whatever
cost in human degradation and disjointed economy, more and more
so ciali zation at whatever cost in peasant opposition, led to such
facts as these: more tractors spoiled and gathering rust than trac-
tors in operation; automobiles leaving the belt as “finished” prod-
ucts without headlights, brakes, or some other vital organ; moun-
tains of goods rotting and rusting in factory yards for lack of
transportation; expensive machines, bought with the torture-money
called valuta, standing idle for lack of repair parts. And all this
was paid for by the masses in accumulating shortages, deprivations,
losses of basic rights.

The sacrificial fallacy, which only an all-powerful state dic-
tatorship can enforce, makes for the relinquishment of political
no less than economic values in the interests of some larger the-
oretical good. In the name of the Five Year Plan one socialist
objective after another was sacrificed. In my own Soviet years, I
saw the control of workers over their own jobs and destinies whit-
tled away to the reductio ad absurdum of whittling: a good round
zero, the perfection of nothingness. A more balanced and inte-
grated economy and political regime would probably have had
less spectacular objects to boast about, but certainly fewer horrors
to conceal.

The inexperience and native sloth of the Russians did not seem
to me, watching the process at close range, a sufficient or honest
explanation of the disbalance. I came to believe that its causes lay
much deeper, in the very assumptions of the Soviet regime, par-
ticularly the assumptions that the sacrifice of human beings did

FOG OF SKEPTICISM OVER RUSSIA 479

not matter in the achievement of human happiness, that the sacri-
fice of socialist ethics were of no account in the building of
socialism, and — most important and most Russian of all — that any-
thing could be accomplished by brute force.

Panicky with fear or consumed by political ambition, officials
piled up factory output to fulfill and overfulfill plans, so that
quality suffered. Construction projects must be driven to the goal
line by May Day or November 7 even if they would collapse a
month later. It seemed more important to provide a good report
than a good product. The Russian department at the University
of Birmingham once calculated that the 1928-29 output of
galoshes in the new Russia, officially given as 48% above 1913,
was actually 29% below 1913 if the factor of durability was taken
into consideration. Nor was it all due to native inefficiency. Much
of the blame must fall on the government’s policies, which as-
sumed that logic and organic development could be “heroically”
and “ruthlessly” substituted by decrees and threats.

By 1932, it was clear to all but the most frenzied partisans of
“Bolshevik ruthlessness” that force does have its limitations. Ab-
solutism, too, has frontiers beyond which it is without jurisdiction.
A dictatorship could squeeze its people, force through industrial
projects at a superhuman pace with involuntary labor. But it could
not create industrial skills or train efficient managers with the
knout. It could impose almost overnight an alien way of life upon
a hundred million peasants, but it could not remold the mind and
instincts of those peasants, and must therefore contend with “kulak
collectives” precisely as it had contended with individual kulaks.

The triumphs of the Five Year Plan were largely in the ex-
ternals of an industrialized society. The essence— a harmonious
economy, a fairly contented people, etc— was farther off than
ever. The good will of the workers, which is an enormous eco-
nomic leverage in any society, had been squandered through hard-
boiled contempt for their immediate needs. Practically the whole
peasantry had been turned to sullen opposition by excessive doses
of force. The technical intelligentsia had been outraged and per-
secuted and emasculated. The whole spirit of the Soviet enter-
prise in these years bred bureaucrats concerned with the prestige
of fine plans and fine statistical fulfillments, regardless of cost or

DISILLUSIONMENT

480

quality, intent upon protecting their own official posts and skins,
while passing the economic buck to others.

The romantic conception of state planning as a magic formula
transcending logic was in disrepute at home. Abroad, too, it lost
some of its force. In the beginning of 1931, the specters of Soviet
dumping threw the world into a panic. Hastily many governments
erected legal barriers against the expected torrents of cheap Soviet
goods. A year later those specters were fading out. Soviet com-
petition lost most of its terror. Far from dominating the world
market for foodstuffs, Soviet grain exports ceased and internal
food difficulties grew more acute. In 1931, coal production was
66 million tons instead of the planned 77 million j iron totaled
5 million tons instead of 8,300,000 j steel likewise 5 million instead
of 8,800,000. The realization grew that Soviet industry would not
become the formidable giant which capitalism feared in one five-
year plan or three 3 it would need decades and generations to meet
its own needs, however political showmanship might dress up its
statistical face.

Ominous symptoms of the industrial dislocation appeared in
sporadic strikes against feeding conditions. Nothing about these
appeared in the press, of course. Yet much of it leaked out. We
could not write about it — and few of us had any inclination to
do so — because we could only match our assertions against the
violent denials of the government. An American spedalist in in-
dustrial psychology, a liberal who analyzed and prescribed for
the illnesses of factory-personnel relations, arrived in Russia. He
heard of the strikes and offered to help the employers — that is,
the government — straighten them out. A little investigation, how-
ever, punctured his fervor. He found that the cause was lack of
food and his system of cure had no specific for that disease. A
technician from the Red Putilov factory in Leningrad, a show
place of the Soviet industrialization and the heart of the 1917
uprising, told me the story of a brief “sit-down” strike there.
By a sort of common impulse the workers had laid down their
tools and ceased work. The authorities rushed many truckloads
of foodstuffs to the Putilov, distributed them liberally, and the
strike was over. In the following days one after another of the
suspected ring-leaders and agitators was called out by the G.P.U.

FOG OF SKEPTICISM OVER RUSSIA 48 I

They never returned. I made a half-hearted attempt to cable the
story but was quickly squelched by the censors.

With difficulties multiplying on all sides, the prospect of a
second and surely no less exacting Five Year Plan did not draw
sparks of enthusiasm from the Russian people. The various com-
missions set up to plot new charts of industrial progress worked
in an atmosphere hushed, apathetic, puzzled, and hostile. The
population was adjusting itself with ill grace to the realization that
at the end of the Piatiletka it would be rewarded only by another
Piatiletka. No one had really expected the Five Year Plan to
accomplish the miracle of turning a primitive, half-starved coun-
try into a comfortable and prosperous place. Yet most of the pop-
ular appeal of the Plan lay precisely in the definiteness and brevity
of the period. It set a term upon suffering.

It was not an easy thing, therefore, for the Soviet people to
pretend ardor for a second plan, though pretend they must in
resolutions and demonstrations. Had the Kremlin been able to
declare a dividend on its promises, in terms of better living con-
ditions, a little of the sullenness might have been dissipated. But
it could not 5 on the contrary, it must pile on new burdens of
discipline, exactions by coercive internal loans, forcible seizure of
grain stocks. Even the least politically literate Russians knew that
no let-up in pressure was possible.

Ever more frequently I heard middle-aged and even younger
Russians say, a Our generation is doomed. Our children . . . per-
haps . .

VII. Planned Chaos

STALIN’S six-point program and the plethora of decrees growing
out of it aimed to inject individual responsibility within the frame-
work of the state’s economic monopolies. This unleashing of pri-
vate initiative for public purposes had some fantastic results.

A managerial job still involved great personal risks. The fren-
zied baiting of specialists had subsided, but failure to fulfill plans
still might bring punishment. The borderline between deliberate
and accidental mistakes was as hard to find as ever. Three succes-
sive directors of one small building cooperative erecting additional
stories on old houses, I happened to know, ended in concentration
camps before the work was completed. The construction of the
Moscow subway had scarcely gotten under way, but already many
of its engineers were under arrest and at least one, it was generally
understood, had been shot.

Cautious, level-headed men with executive ability continued,
in the main, to avoid responsibility like the plague. They feared
that the new authority conferred upon yesterday’s class enemies
might be only additional rope for their eventual hanging. I knew
that my friend Pavel Semionovich, for instance, was dodging re-
sponsible executive work, preferring to eke out a meager livelihood
through occasional technical articles. Like thousands of others he
felt that genuine safety lay, in the final analysis, in obscurity. Even
in the Foreign Office, a crawling swamp of careerism, there were
men who kept themselves carefully in the background 5 one, to
my knowledge, wriggled out of promotions repeatedly, making
way cheerfully for younger and less able men.

But there were others for whom authority was a tempting and
heady beverage. Born tradesmen and schemers, they rushed greed-
ily for the power, the sense of importance, the material rewards.
For the first time since the suppression of Nep the natural go-
getters, the breed of entrepreneurs, had scope for their talents.

The years of persecution had killed off or disabled tens of

482

PLANNED CHAOS

483

thousands of experienced men, so that the shortage of directorial
personnel was sharp. Men who normally would not have quali-
fied as managers of a single store found themselves lifted to
supreme command of city-wide or nation-wide trading trusts.
Men who ordinarily might have attained a foremanship, not in-
frequently were put in charge of construction jobs involving tens
of millions of rubles and tens of thousands of workers.

Appetites for economic conniving starved by long denial were
suddenly let loose. Money, prestige, promotion, the sheer joy of
bargaining and scheming, moved this type of official or engineer
(engineer is a vague and all-inclusive word in its Russian usage)
to miracles of accomplishment. He found deficit building ma-
terials where there were none, pulled technical personnel out of
his cap, produced transportation where others could not find it.
They were not always healthy accomplishments: the deficit ma-
terials were as likely as not filched from some other urgent under-
taking; the technicians “stolen” from other trusts ; the diversion
of railroad cars left other goods to rot.

Each man seemed concerned only with making a good showing
on his own restricted job, and the devil take the hindmost. An
enormous amount of off-record barter developed. The manager
of a construction project, let us say, had an extra carload of radi-
ators but not enough window glass. He traded the extra radiators
for nails. He did not need nails himself but knew that they were
in great demand and could be exchanged sooner or later for glass.
The word that described this curious type of business promotion
was kombmatsya? — literally, a “combination” or scheme. Kombi -
natsya solved seemingly insoluble problems.

Vasya, a dark young man with small shifty eyes and a broad
streak of vulgarity, was a veritable genius at kombinatsya . He
took an artist’s pride in his skill in arranging, manipulating,
smoothing out difficulties; every now and then he told me gloat-
ingly of some extravagant scheme in progress as though exhibiting
a masterpiece. He had acquaintances at key points, not excluding
the G.P.U., and paid favor for favor. His talents made him an
asset to any economic organization, and if he drew four or five
salaries simultaneously as “technical consultant” to as many enter-
prises, he earned every one of them.

Somehow Vasya had food delicacies for his family when even

484 DISILLUSIONMENT

commissars went without them; somehow he managed to buy
valuta products for rubles. His pockets bulged with “documents”
that admitted him to all sorts of places, gave him all sorts of
privileges, and recommended him warmly to divers influential
people. Whatever the problem of the trust to which he was
accredited consultant, he had a document and a hombina-tsya which
he mixed and juggled to produce a magical solution. Ultimately,
Vasya ended up with a ten-year term of exile — the best-laid kom-
binatsya may go awry — but that’s another story ; even in exile he
found a kowbinatsy a that took him legitimately to Moscow at
frequent intervals!

Illicit barter, economic log-rolling, excessive zeal in small mat-
ters to the detriment of larger state interests, quickly developed
into a stubborn problem for the Kremlin. Decrees were issued
making such things illegal; demonstrative arrests and trials were
staged. But objective conditions turned the decrees into dead let-
ters. The hazard of falling down on the plan was normally greater
than the hazard of being tangled in a kombinatsya. Beneath the
varnished externals of official plans there was this proliferating
grab-as-grab-can planlessness.

This nether world of unplanned, harshly competitive enterprise
under the surface of the Five Year Plan seems to have escaped
the notice of foreign students of Soviet economy. Like currency
inflation and other concealed elements in the economic set-up, it
did not show up in the formal statistics and interviews. One might
almost assert that “dialectically” the pressure of planned economy
under a political dictatorship was creating its extreme opposite: a
chaotic and furtive economy of desperate adjustments.

What applied to deficit materials and services applied also to
deficit labor forces and brain power. While the Kremlin was exert-
ing itself to hold down the fearful turnover of labor, many a
factory director did not scruple to divert workers from other estab-
lishments to his own, sometimes by spreading rumors of better
feeding conditions, sometimes by offering transportation and bet-
ter wages. Directors were constantly complaining that some other
office or trust had “lured” its technicians by promises of ad-
vantages.

In the sphere of the food supply, too, large-scale socialization
by fiat and centralized economic control evoked their very oppo-

PLANNED CHAOS

485

sites: a disordered and hectic and futile attempt of individuals and
small groups to raise food for their own immediate needs. Truck
gardening and poultry culture had been practically exterminated
with the suppression of private farming. Unable to feed its popu-
lation, the government now tossed the responsibility back to the
people. It ordered and exhorted them to raise their own food.

Yesterday, private farming was considered a petty bourgeois
leftover; today, it was a patriotic duty for every Soviet citizen
who had access to a few square yards of arable soil to plant vege-
tables, raise pigs and breed rabbits. Factory workers achieved pub-
lication of their faces by raising a record crop of cabbage in their
back yards. Great machine shops and coal mines and tractor plants
as a side-line now went in for truck gardening and rabbit breeding
to help feed their own employees! The press echoed with propa-
ganda for this self-help; industrial leaders were reprimanded for
their failure to raise carrots and their ineptitude at breeding
porkers.

Only the growing pathos of food shortage — now rolling ever
faster towards the calamitous winter of 1932-33 — made it impos-
sible to smile at the absurdity and wastage of the situation.

2

The rabbit had emerged as a national hero (or rather heroine,
since her fecundity was at the bottom of the new fame) in 1931.
It was the successor, in that role, of an even less fastidious if less
proliferous animal: the pig, which in 1930 had been counted upon
to provide the Soviet Union with the meat killed off by forcible
collectivization. The pig failed, failed dismally, despite all the
arrests and punishments for sabotage of the pig-breeding cam-
paign. Orders therefore came through from on high that where
the ungrateful porker had failed, the rabbit must succeed! The
female bunny was cast in the role of Joan of Arc!

Those unfamiliar with Soviet ballyhoo in full blast cannot even
imagine the celebrity that came to the rabbit. To this humble
creature, innocent of birth control and not too finicky about hous-
ing and diet, was assigned the task of replenishing the meat sup-
ply. Its picture was in the papers and on the billboards. Academi-
cians wrote learned papers about its habits and nutritional values.

DISILLUSIONMENT

486

Bawdy jokes about its love life multiplied. Economists and plan-
ners provided elaborate charts and figures showing how one pair
of rabbits, given a proper chance, could in short order fill the land
with their progeny. It was all very simple.

If the rabbit, too, failed in its mission, it was certainly not for
lack of encouragement. A whole nation was cheering. But fail it
did. By the summer of 1932 its reputation was pretty definitely
forfeit. Somehow, the creatures did not multiply as expected in
the cages at steel mills and in the courtyards of the city folks.
Somewhere, there was a kulak taint in them — they simply lost
their libido in all-Soviet surroundings, and developed cantankerous
diseases; they forgot how to breed and began to die off as fast as
class enemies in concentration camps. The fact that one official
sent the male rabbits to one city and the females to another ex-
plains only the failure in those two places. Lack of proper food
and the blundering ways of steel mill workers with rabbits may
account for the failure elsewhere. A few forlorn bunnies now still
lingered on billboards and a few arrests for disrupting the rabbit
breeding program were still being made — great campaigns die
slowly. But the rabbit was through, like the pig before him.

Before the end of this summer, mammals were abandoned in
a huff, and faith pinned on a fungus: mushrooms, that great na-
tional resource, until now shamefully neglected, came into their
own. The same Academicians now published articles — articles were
very well paid — proving that mushrooms are a first-rate substi-
tute for meat. Editorials and radio speeches proved that there
were enough ungarnered mushrooms in the country to feed every
man, woman, and child; anyone who starved was therefore clearly
a lazy lout who deserved to starve. Mushroom collection parties
were organized everywhere on the free days. School children by
the hundred thousand picked the fungi in shock brigades.

But the mushroom craze died even more quickly than the rabbit
hope. A half-hearted and rather shamefaced campaign was then
started for the snail; a front-page story one day apprised the
Soviet citizenry that Frenchmen, admittedly the most cultured
of races, not only eat snails but thrive on them, and the Academi-
cians in following issues cashed in with a new series of articles.
The snails, however, never quite took hold of the propaganda

PLANNED CHAOS 487

machine, by this time exhausted from the extravagant promotion
of pigs, rabbits, and mushrooms.

It is hard to believe that the Kremlin leaders seriously expected
amateur gardening and rabbit breeding by hard-worked prole-
tarians to solve the food problem. My own surmise at the time,
to which I still adhere, is that in investing tons of paper, ink and
lung power on such economic horse-play the authorities intended
merely to maintain popular morale by raising hope of an imme-
diate food supply: pig, rabbit, mushroom, snail were the successive
carrots dangled in front of the plodding donkey’s nose.

The recalcitrance of the rabbits, incidentally, calls to my mind
a curious conversation with an American specialist on a related
subject. We met on the train going from Moscow to the frontier.
When I introduced myself, he said without prelude:

“This here country ain’t gonna solve its food troubles until its
horses and cattle begin to make love again.”

“Say that again,” I smiled, suspecting a hoax. “I’m afraid I
don’t get you.”

“Sure you don’t,” he said with a serious mien; “what you bozos
who write articles out of your heads don’t know is that Russian
anim als don’t make love any more. They’ve lost interest in life,
I might say. Especially the horses. The Russians buy the best bulls
and stallions in Argentina and Canada and places and pay a lot
of dough for ’em, but soon after they get here they pay no more
attention to females than they would to you and me. And the
females plain ignore their husbands. It’s the lousy fodder and
not enough of it. See?”

I was beginning to see. The American was a specialist in stock
raising, working at one of the largest of the sovkhozes devoted
to animal breeding. This was his first trip “out” in more than a
year. And a most disgusted citizen he was.

“We gotta use artificial tricks to breed ’em,” he went on, and
for a half hour described those tricks. “But artificial impregnation
don’t always work; if the animal ain’t up to snuff physically they
drop the calves and colts before time or stillborn. No, siree, they
can’t lick this thing until the peasants and the chemical industry
begin to deliver good rich food for the animals.”

4 88

DISILLUSIONMENT

3

It was at the railroad station at R., while on a trip into the
country, in the summer of 1932, that I witnessed a scene which
was to prove more significant than I guessed at the moment —
a tiny symptom of the shattering tragedy engulfing southern
Russia. An old peasant, with a shaggy head and matted beard,
wearing a burlap coat, patched trousers and reed shoes ( l&pti )
was weeping aloud, unashamedly, and pleading with the station-
master through his sobs. The peasant was holding a large heavy
sack.

“You can go on the next train, tomorrow morning, yes, 53 the
station-master said, not unkindly, “but not your bundle. Law is
law — no bread can be transported without a license. 55

“But, citizen station-master, dear one, 55 the old man repeated,
“how can I return to the village with empty hands? Without the
money and without bread? Tell me, dear one, how shall I face
the village? They await my return and their bellies are empty.
Now I have spent all their money — no bread, no money. . . . 55

The station-master shrugged his shoulders. He had been listen-
ing to this refrain for hours: since his men ordered the shaggy
peasant and his sack off the train. The peasant now turned to me
and several other spectators.

“Some of us in the village 55 — he mentioned a province in
Ukraine — “got together. We threw our money in one pot, and
they chose me to go north, where money could buy bread. I paid
a fortune for what I have in this sack. And now they won’t
let me take it to the village. And why? Others in nearby villages
did the same, and they had bread to eat for weeks. They feasted.
Why were they allowed but not I? Is that Soviet justice? Citizen
station-master, whom will it harm if I take this bag on a train?
I shall keep it on my lap and creep into a corner on the topmost
shelf. 55

“It will do you no good, citizen, 55 the station-master said. “You’ll
be chucked off at some other station. Law is law.”

Several weeks earlier I had read the decree forbidding the trans-
port of bread and other food products without a license. The
purpose, the papers explained dishonestly, was to prevent the

PLANNED CHAOS 489

further overcrowding of trains. I had wondered whether the de-
cree deserved a line by cable, and decided against it.

The weeping old peasant hit by the decree, unable to under-
stand why he should not be permitted to bring bread to his family
and his neighbors, personalized that law for me. Always, any-
where, it is easier to accept news in the abstract, in cold print,
than in its warm human form. For months I forgot this incident.
Then, as the horrors of famine began to pile up, the scene came
to life again in my mind, its every lineament sharply etched. Not
all the sophistries of my communist friends explaining and justify-
ing the famine could erase this old man in his burlap coat.

Conditions in agrarian Russia were shaping up for disaster.
Late in 1931, the government was obliged once again to resort
to undisguised coercion in collecting grain from the peasants —
this time, be it noted, from socialized farmers as well as individ-
ual growers. Notwithstanding the baptism of forcible socialization,
the peasants were unregenerate at the core. In collectives they be-
haved as before: wherever possible they distributed the surplus
production among the members, who promptly buried it for a
rainy day. After paying the a tractor station” 20 or 25% of the
crop for the use of its machinery, and paying the state banks an
installment for cash loans, and paying the government for its
advances in seed, there was little enough surplus to divide. The
state exactions, thinly camouflaged as government “purchases,”
seemed to ninety-nine out of a hundred peasants outright rob-
bery.

And why, in the name of Marx and Engels, should they have
relinquished the products of their labor for paper money that
could buy nothing? A government which ridiculed compassion and
prided itself on callousness could scarcely expect the peasants
to behave like philanthropists. Socialization based almost entirely
on brute force could expect to maintain itself only by continued
use of brute force. Renewed coercion, and particularly the con-
fiscation of cattle for meat collection arrears, started another wave
of slaughter of livestock. The situation was complicated, more-
over, by the partial crop failure of 1931.

An inkling of the peasant tragedy came to the world in the
first months of 1932 in dispatches out of Bucharest. Rumanian

490 DISILLUSIONMENT

frontier guards began to discover the bullet-riddled bodies of
Moldavian peasants from the Soviet side on the frozen river
Dniester which separated the two countries at this point. There
were days when the corpses totaled into hundreds. Soviet soldiers
were using machineguns to shoot down peasants trying to escape

the country. .

B uchar est newspapermen went to the border and returned with
harrowing details of a mass flight from threatening hunger and
official oppression. For every peasant who succeeded in crossing
the line it was obvious that several had been killed in the at-
tempt. Moscow made the expected denials, but Soviet 'representa-
tives in Rumania were of necessity more frank. They took part
in a Soviet-Rumanian commission which sought to identify the
corpses and arranged for burial. From Poland and other con-
tiguous countries came similar accounts of flight and death.

Soon the government ordered a halt to coercive seizure of farm
products and published the same old promises to obey its own
Jaws — the oft-repeated pattern of broken faith with the peasant
masses. It went farther and reduced grain collection quotas for
the new year by 20% and gave the peasants, individual farmers
and collectives alike, the right to bring their produce to the open
market for sale at open-market prices, twenty and thirty times
higher than the official prices.

The retreat was too late. Already many agricultural districts
were petitioning the central authorities for food relief. Those who
had hidden stocks were afraid to bring them into the open. Dis-
trust of the government was by now second nature.

It required no sociological clairvoyance to recognize that the
country’s agriculture was heading for catastrophe in this, the final
year of the tragic Five Year Plan, tragic alike in its successes
and in its failures. It was no accident that the growing peasant
“recalcitrance” was greatest in just those areas where the “suc-
cess” was greatest. The ultimate disaster, ranking with the great-
est catastrophes in modern times, occurred in precisely those prov-
inces that had been declared “100% collectivized,” precisely where
the “liquidation of kulaks” had been announced as 100% per-
fect, namely, the Ukraine and North Caucasus. Where the force
was greatest, the reaction was greatest; the tragedy was in direct
proportion to the “successes.”

PLANNED CHAOS

49 1

Four years o£ pressure had squeezed the last drop of active op-
position out of the peasantry. Violent expressions of dissatisfac-
tion were increasingly rare. A more terrible, less palpable opposi-
tion had arisen — a supine despair manifest in indifference, lazi-
ness, neglect. The richest grain areas were suddenly over-run
with weeds so luxuriant that they broke the teeth of mechanical
reapers. Pravda and Izvestia began to write more candidly about
crops rotting unharvested on the fields. Angry opposition had
given way to lackadaisical non-cooperation.

What the Webbs were to call the “rebelliousness” of the peas-
ants was nothing of the sort 5 rebellion can be dealt with by a power-
ful government. How deal with an animal-like indifference, a
weariness of the spirit and body so profound that even the prospect
of death by starvation could not stir them into activity? The
Soviet government, in the last year of its Plan, faced those final
unanswerable Asiatic arguments: silence and inactivity and prostrate
hopelessness. The world had seen an expression of these Asiatic
arguments in India, in the non-cooperation movement; but the
Indian apathy was more conscious. Russia’s peasant masses adopted
the tactics of passive resistance almost unconsciously, through a sort
of torpor and sluggishness and bottomless hopelessness.

Half-heartedly, they raised enough food for themselves, hazily
aware, and scarcely caring, that the government might take it
from them. Torpidly, they ate their seed allotment, not enough
vitality left in their spirit to wonder what next. The British and
American literature of apologetics which in later years “blamed”
the peasants for the famine that killed millions of them was
either cynical or stupid. One might as well blame draught ani-
mals for collapsing under the excessive load. The paralyzing in-
difference of the Russian peasantry that brought the greatest crop
of weeds in recorded history and left bread crops to rot while
men and women starved was not a rebellious “plot” — forty mil-
lion people do not easily conspire together. None of it was by de-
sign. It was an expression of ultimate hopelessness, a natural
catastrophe of the human spirit, a non-cooperation movement that
was akin to mass suicide.

In Moscow, the encroaching tragedy was manifest in a hundred
symptoms, over and above the verbal reports by people who had
been in the fiighly collectivized regions and those with relatives

492 disillusionment

there. The throngs of refugees around the railroad stations grew
always bigger. Street beggary grew. A continuous stream of beg-
gars came to our kitchen door. There was a timid knock 5 you
opened the door and faced a ragged peasant, man or woman, on
his knees pleading for a piece of bread. A friend who worked
in the post office told me that the number of packages being
sent by parcel post to villages in the Ukraine and North Caucasus
was growing constantly larger — bread and other foodstuffs being
sent to relatives in the regions that once fed not only Russia but
half of Europe.

About half a dozen correspondents went to see the great
Dnieper dam in construction, now being rushed to completion.
An official of Dnieprostroi conducted us over the site and stocked
us up with boastful statistics. 1 had a letter of introduction to a
General Electric engineer from his chief in Moscow. As I sat
with him discussing the dam— and his off-record version was less
optimistic than the statistics in my pocket — I heard a door at the
rear of the house opening and closing at intervals of a few minutes.
The sounds distracted my attention.

“Oh, that?” the engineer smiled wryly when I asked about
the noise. “Come and I’ll show you.”

He led me to the kitchen. A wicker basket near the door was
half-filled with slices of black bread. A grimy peasant woman
was being given a slice by the servant as we entered.

“All day long these poor people come begging for bread,” the
engineer explained. “I have a basketful ready for them. Most
of them are peasants from the surrounding country, but a good
many of them are workers on the construction whose rations are
not enough for their large families. I suppose some of them
are hoarding against the future, but I’d rather be played for
a sucker than turn away a hungry beggar.”

“I’m afraid you are lacking in Bolshevik ruthlessness,” I said.

“I suppose I am,” he laughed. “So, as I was saying, these tur-
bines should be ready for the test in three or four months. . . .”

In August, we sent our first reports of executions for the theft
of socialized property. Members of a collective farm helping
themselves to the grain they had themselves raised were subject
to capital punishment. It was not easy to cure the peasant of the

PLANNED CHAOS

493

mistake that he could take a few bushels of the grain from the
land that he and his family had worked on. The decree also ap-
plied to theft of socialized property of any other kind, whether
in the city or on the land. Since practically everything in the
U.S.S.R. except one’s personal clothes and furnishings was social-
ized property, the decree in effect made all stealing a capital
crime.

Thus, in the fifteenth year of Bolshevism, in the last year of
the Piatiletka, the Russian people were presented with the harsh-
est law since the advent of the revolution. Shrill editorials boasted
of the implacability of revolutionary justice, and newly minted
communists in New York applauded.

VIII. The End of RAPP

AND another of those “revolutions” from above came to pass in
this spring of 1932, this time in the realms of arts and letters.
With a single and resounding whack, Joseph Stalin did shatter
and disperse the phalanxes of embattled “proletarian” writers,
poets, dramatists, painters and musicians. His one imperial ukase
was enough to send all the enthroned nonentities, their generals
and their camp-followers, sprawling in the mud. Brusquely Stalin
informed them that their vaunted “conquest of power in art” for
the proletariat had blighted Soviet letters and turned Russian
art into a desert.

Out with the bureaucrats of literature, the time-servers of art!
Out with the cliques and the “left vulgarizers” of esthetics! A
decree on April 23, 1932, dissolved RAPP and its sister organiza-
tions and commanded that all writers be made eligible to a broader,
less politically orthodox society, the Union of Soviet Writers. _

It would be less than human for Soviet authors not to relish
the sight of yesterday’s literary dictators crawling on their bellies
in the mire, the spectacle of piddling poets and second-rate journal-
ists, who had set up as orthodox judges of art, now scampering
back to their dusty holes. The chief trouble with the politicians
of art, Stalin now proclaimed, was that they produced no art,
contenting themselves with loud conferences, pompous programs,
and attacks on the talented. And Stalin’s parrot press, which on
April 22 failed to note any flaw in the system of art by terror, on
April 24 proceeded to kick and pommel the fallen Napoleons
with all the fury of long-suppressed desire. All of this made a
brief holiday for artistic and intellectual circles in Moscow.

Wi thin a few months, no one even remembered the names of
the Auerbachs and Chumandrins, of all the whilom tsars of pro-
letarian literature, Bolshevized criticism, Leninist painting and
the rest of it — proof enough of the emptiness of their pretensions.
Nothing remained to mark their reign except a litter of pro-

494

THE END OF RAPP 495

nunciamentos and the ashes of artists whom they had hounded to
suicide and broken on the rack of persecution.

If, for most of the leaders and hangers-on of RAPP, the “con-
quest” of art had been a convenient path to careers, there were
others who had brought themselves honestly to believe their
own twaddle. They were really convinced that the G.P.U. was
the final authority on esthetics and that a text from Stalin out-
weighed the accumulated beauty of human genius. Uninspired
bookkeepers of literary sins and virtues like Sergei Dinamov,
fervent sloganeers in verse like Bezimensky, ambitious writers of
editorials in four acts like Kirshon, were blinded by bewilderment
under Stalin’s sudden blow. They must not only accept humilia-
tion, but must kiss the knout publicly and pretend that they “recog-
nized their mistakes.”

It is not pleasant to hear people shouting, “Down with us!
Kick harder, O brethren!” Not even when they deserve it.

How unrelated Stalin’s edict was to inner forces in the nation’s
life may be judged from the astonishment it caused. The blow
fell while the ink was still wet on the most elaborate of the pon-
tifical RAPP programs for the development of proletarian culture.
The Literary Gazette, mouthpiece of the whole proletarian art
movement, in its groggy bewilderment, failed to cry “Amen!”
loud enough to the decree that ended its power, and was duly
disciplined. In the next issue, the editors beat their breasts and
begged indulgence. In the very act of bestowing a counterfeit
freedom upon the arts, the Kremlin made a show of its absolutist
power over creative thought. For intelligent artists it was not a
victory but a deep insult.

Abroad, too, in all the little magazines of the communist move-
ment, in the literary circles where esthetic proletarianism had
become the fashion, there was confusion and humiliation.

But the sycophants and hosanna-singers everywhere quickly re-
gained their poise. Without a word of apology for their own antics,
they hailed the Stalin ukase as a masterpiece of dialectic leader-
ship. They managed to find some esoteric wisdom in Stalin’s
failure or refusal to understand the depredations of the heresy-
hunters in the arts until this spring of 1932, when Soviet intel-
lectual life was a blighted desert. Again his tragic lateness was in-

496 disillusionment

vested by the faithful with a higher wisdom surpassing the under-
standing of infidels.

I was close enough to the edges of artistic circles, through a
dozen or two friends, to share their gleeful feeling of sated re-
venge. But I was close enough, also, to share their sense of frus-
tration and shame. With a wink of his little finger, Stalin had done
what the whole community of Russian artists in years of grum-
bling and sacrifice and heartbreak had failed to do. They were
pleased with the cutting down of RAPP but they could scarcely
take, any joy in this new demonstration of the helplessness and
subserviency of the arts.

The new freedom, whatever it might be worth in practice, was
given to artists as a royal gift, and the same omnipotence which
today chose to be benevolent might be doubly malevolent^ to-
morrow. The change in the domain of art was in no way intrinsic
—it was itself an act of violence. The artists whom it ostensibly
liberated could feel no sense of personal fulfillment; their hands
remained tied behind their backs.

Once, when I was in my ’teens, I sweated over a short story
of the ambitious psychologizing sort dear to undergraduate fiction
writers. I started with a man unjustly condemned to prison. All
his brooding and outraged innocence focus on a dream of escape.
Only freedom by the strength of his own wit and courage could
square accounts with the system that robbed him of human dig-
nity. This dream sustains him in his confinement. But suddenly
the end of his term comes so close that he can see it and the
prospect horrifies him. To be let out with a pat on the shoulder
by the hated keepers seemed to him only an added indignity. He
feels ever more sharply that in accepting freedom as a gift, in-
stead of wresting it from unwilling keepers, he would be ac-
knowledging their right to dispose of his life. And at the last
moment, to ward off that humiliation, he attempts a hopeless
jail-break, is subdued and given a new sentence — more time to plot
a successful escape.

Soviet writers liberated from the yoke of RAPP, by the same
external and arbitrary power which put the yoke on their necks,
felt something of the revulsion which hurt my imaginary prisoner
even more than prison itself.

THE END OF RAPP

497

2

Behind Stalin’s sudden fit of good sense in regard to art, some
people detected the guiding hand of Maxim Gorky. Despite his
adherence to the Bolshevik group since its beginning, and despite
his friendship with Lenin, Gorky had opposed Bolshevik methods
after the revolution on humanistic grounds. But from about 1929
forward he yielded to the philosophy of ruthlessness. In the late
spring of 1931 he gave up his home in Sorrento, Italy, and
settled permanently in Moscow.

Until then a favorite Soviet conundrum ran: “Who lives well
in the U.S.S.R.? Answer — Gorky in Sorrento.” Now the conun-
drum was obsolete. He was known to have become one of Stalin’s
most intimate associates, his word weighing heavily in the scales
of the dictator’s decisions. On those rare occasions when Stalin
showed himself in public, the stooped, shaggy figure of the great
writer was usually by his side.

Gorky, the universally acknowledged father of proletarian litera-
ture, became the Kremlin’s author-laureate. His articles on cul-
tural matters, and even on economic and political themes, were
regarded more and more as the authentic voice of the Kremlin.
They showed increasingly a tendency to pontificate, instruct and re-
buke younger writers.

There is no doubt that on the whole Soviet literature had a
friend at court in Gorky. More than once he saved erring writers
from the official boot 3 several times to my own knowledge he
obtained for Soviet artists the supreme boon of a trip abroad. There
may even be some basis for the theory (advanced after his death)
that Gorky, in swallowing Stalin’s personal dictatorship and its
attendant brutalities, had deliberately compromised with his con-
science in the hope of mitigating the harshness of the regime.*

Nevertheless, writers and artists resented deeply Gorky’s sur-
render to the temporal powers after a long lifetime of struggle

* Recent disclosures strengthen the picture of Gorky as a champion of greater
tolerance, playing on Stalin’s vanity to obtain more humane treatment of non-
communist intellectuals. He is known to have argued so vehemently against the
terror which followed Kirov’s assassination that he incurred Stalin’s disfavor for
a period. In 1935, the breach reached a point where Gorky tried to leave the
country — and was denied an exit visa!

498 DISILLUSIONMENT

for the dignity of the human spirit. His influence at court might
be useful, but it was a compromising role and one incongruous
with his entire career. That eloquent voice of Gorky, which had
rung out so long and so lustily for the persecuted and the disin-
herited, now joined every official chorus of blood hate. In his
diatribes against the chosen victims of political persecution, one
expected at least a touch of compassion, an echo of the old Gorky
who hated suffering and bloodshed, but one found only obbligatos
to the slogans in the editorial columns and official theses. The man
who wrote M.y Childhood and The Lower Depths never got
around to speaking up for the innocent children of “class ene-
mies,” never once protested against the deepening horror of con-
centration camps and valuta tortures, the indignity of the new
internal passport system, the hounding of pre-revolutionary in-
tellectuals of his own generation.

Outwardly, at least, it seemed that Gorky had capitulated—
that the crusading rebel had turned into an irascible old reaction-
ary. In return for honors such as had rarely before come to any
great literary man in his own lifetime, he had consented to act
as cultural window-dressing for a dictatorship that betrayed every
humane and cultural element in his own literary legacy. Gorky,
an old and sick man, weary in body and spirit, was placing the seal
of his intellectual respectability on every crime perpetrated by the
Kremlin. He applauded when the forty-eight professors were put
to death without trial j he called for death and vengeance, in almost
the same hysterical words as Pravda and Izvestia, every time an-
other batch of men was brought to a demonstration trial on charges
compounded by the secret service.

The newer generation of Soviet writers, many of whom had
been brought up in adoration of Gorky’s compassionate humanism
and uncompromising devotion to truth, felt let down. To ques-
tion any word of Gorky’s had become as dangerous almost as ques-
tioning a word of Stalin’s or Kaganovich’s — the loved story-teller
had been transfigured into an untouchable Pooh-Bah of literature.
But privately, among trusted friends, I have heard him assailed as
a renegade to his own past. Writers whom Gorky invited to his
“at homes” were flattered and thrilled. There they were sure
to find the mighty of the land, sometimes Stalin Himself. But
in their own minds they did not confuse the enthroned Gorky of

THE END OF RAPP 499

his last few years with the earlier, the true Gorky of deathless
fame in the history of the human spirit.

The apotheosis of Gorky was to take place in September of this
year, 1932, when the Soviet government celebrated forty years of
his literary activity. The Bolshoi Theater was the scene. All the
important political leaders, from Stalin down, were on the plat-
form 3 all the kosher men of letters, the goose-stepping artists,
and successful flatterers were there. It was there decreed that the
ancient city of Nijni-Novgorod, scene of Gorky’s boyhood suf-
ferings, should thereafter carry his name. Tverskaya, which is Mos-
cow’s Main Street, was renamed Gorky Street. The Moscow Art
Theatre, though its tradition is forever linked with the name of An-
ton Chekhov, was renamed for Gorky — an indignity Gorky himself
deplored. Everything that an all-powerful dictatorship could do
to exalt and flatter and overawe the shaggy and rather pathetic old
man was done.

It was a sort of solemn interment of the revolutionary Gorky 3
what remained was a mummified and sanctified old man. Perhaps
he felt this. When he rose to speak his voice was curiously sad,
deprecating. “No mortal man,” he said, “could possibly deserve
all this.” But he did not find in himself the strength to utter
words like “freedom” and “idealism” and “beauty” — words that
were the keynotes in the symphony of his genius.

3

The future American ambassador to the U.S.S.R., William C.
Bullitt, came to Moscow that spring on an unofficial errand, pre-
sumably for the future President of the United States. “Franklin
Roosevelt will be the next President,” he assured me at our first
meeting, “and American recognition of the Soviet government
will be one of the first acts of his administration.” The mission,
whatever it was, apparently was not proceeding too smoothly.
Commissar Litvinov, whom Bullitt was particularly anxious to
see, was not in Moscow. The casual manner in which Bullitt
was received is sufficiently clear from the fact that Intourist stuck
him into the worst of the tourist hotels, the New Moscow, on
the other side of the river. The food there was not agreeing with

500 disillusionment

him, and our Shura’s cooking saved another American from the
gastronomical blues.

Sentimental to the core, Bullitt felt that he could not leave
Moscow without placing flowers on the grave of his friend John
Reed, whose widow, Louise Bryant, he married some time after
Reed’s death. Reed’s ashes were buried on Red Square, just out-
side the Kremlin wall, along with other native and foreign heroes
of the revolution. The graves are within easy view but not within
easy approach, being surrounded by an iron fence. The decoration
of the grave therefore came down to the eternal problem of ob-
taining a propusk , a permit to go behind the fence. George An-
dreychine,* whom I had visited in Leavenworth Prison thirteen
years ago, and who since then had tasted a lot of Soviet prison,
was now an official of Intourist. His efforts through that organiza-
tion, seconded by my own through the Foreign OfEce, finally
elicited the propusk.

Early one morning, Bullitt, Andreychine, and I drove to Red
Square. Two of us watched from the distance while Bullitt,
carrying a large wreath, walked solemnly toward Reed’s grave.
We saw him place the flowers on the stone and stand there with
bowed head for many minutes. When he returned to the car,
tears were rolling down his cheeks and his features were drawn
with sorrow. No one said a word as we drove to the New Moscow
Hotel.

I talked a great deal with Bullitt during his visit. His concep-
tion of the new Russia was deeply colored by the romanticism
of the earliest period, when he made his memorable trip to Mos-
cow for President Wilson during the Versailles peace negotiations.
He was thoroughly informed, of course, about the physical changes
that had taken place in the intervening thirteen years, but wholly
innocent of the far greater changes in the mood of the revolu-
tion— the hardening of its emotional arteries, its callousness and
unromantic “realism.” He was still seeing Russia through the
fresh ardors of the John Reeds and the Rhys Williamses. I re-
member saying to Billy after a long evening of talk, “Bullitt’s en-
thusiasm for Russia, I’m afraid, wouldn’t survive a long residence

* Exiled again by the Soviet authorities about 1935.

THE END OF RAPP

501

here. . . . It’s based on romantic assumptions that no longer hold
good. ...” I was a better prophet than I guessed at the time.

Cecil B. DeMille typified another side of foreigners 5 uncritical
enthusiasm for the Soviet experiment. He was thrilled by its
sheer exoticism, its swarming and ripe-odored backwardness. He
had watched the gray mass pouring through Red Square in a
parade, lost himself in the tangle of Moscow’s crowded sidewalks,
and was impressed with the pictorial challenge of this crowded
humanity. “Feet . . . marching feet . . . millions of them march-
ing endlessly,” he tried to explain his feeling to me. “If ever I
do a picture about the new Russia, that would be its motif . . .
feet in leather and feet in rags and bare feet, but all marching,
moving, flowing . . . Feet! 55

There was, of course, nothing particularly new and Bolshevik
in these feet. What the gifted DeMille, a mystic to his finger-
tips and sensitive to the drama and pathos of mankind in the mass,
felt was the ant-hill abundance of this Russian people, and its
picturesque poverty. He would have reacted in exactly the same
way twenty years earlier, in the tsar’s Russia. John Reed the poet,
before 191J, before he dreamed of being a communist, had writ-
ten: “Russian ideals are the most exhilarating ; Russian thought
the freest, Russian art the most exuberant ; Russian food and drink
are to me the best, and Russians themselves are, perhaps, the most
interesting human beings that exist!” Later Reed was to read
Marxist enthusiasms into his esthetic feeling for the age-old back-
wardness.

DeMille and a thousand other foreigners now read “the new
Russia” into that backwardness. Shall I ever forget the shock of
a passage in Waldo Frank’s book about Russia in which he re-
counted his mystical transport as he walks through the streets of
Leningrad? He could not eat, he wrote with a singular lack of
humor, because he wanted to sing 3 this at a time when the drab
population which caused his mystical anorexia could not eat for
other and less lyrical reasons.

DeMille never made that picture on the new Russia, though
he toyed with the idea for years. Possibly he discovered that swarm-
ing feet were not specifically Russian — what interested him most in
Russia, in other words, was its human element, not its Soviet

DISILLUSIONMENT

502

trimmings. He urged me to give him a story on which he might
do a picture. Billy and I were to dine with him and the gracious
Mrs. DeMille on their last evening in Moscow. I had not thought
about a story. That afternoon Billy, who has a better “story mind”
than I, helped me to work out a plot: we imagined a crowded
Moscow apartment, conveniently stocked with different types of
Soviet human beings, and nicely scrambled in political and emo-
tional tangles.

At dinner, in the Hotel Metropole, DeMille asked for the
story. I explained that I had an idea, but very much in the rough.
“All right, let’s hear it,” he said. I began the narrative hastily
concocted a few hours earlier. As I talked, however, DeMille’s
face took on a strangely quizzical expression, somewhere between
amusement and astonishment. I was disconcerted but decided to
plow right ahead to the bitter end. When I had finished the story
DeMille looked me in the eyes:

“Tell me, Gene,” he said, “have you read the play just writ-
ten by Walter Duranty and Maurice Hindus?”

“No, I haven’t. I knew they were writing a play but haven’t the
slightest idea what it’s about.”

“That’s extraordinary! Almost uncanny,” DeMille said. “They
gave me the play to read, and I just finished it. Well, this story
you have just told me is almost the identical story in their play!”

It was my turn to be astonished. But perhaps the thing was not
as strange as it seemed at first blush. All of us had had approxi-
mately the same experience and in attempting to convey that ex-
perience in fictional terms chose the obvious story.

IX. Living Space

ASKED to list the cities she had learned to know intimately in
her ten crowded years of life, our Genie replied without hesita-
tion, “New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and Klyasma.”
The Klyasma thus bracketed with more notable metropoli out-
weighed, at the moment, the others in importance. Its broad muddy
avenues and rowdy children and nude bathing, its easy and earthy
ways, must have impressed Genie as pleasantly exciting after the
trim orderliness and hushed respectability of Lichterfelde in Ber-
lin where she was being schooled.

Klyasma, where we spent the summer of 1932, lay on a meander-
ing river of the same name, about thirty miles outside of Moscow.
It retained the externals of its former character as a summer re-
sort and suburban residential town for middle-class Muscovites ;
roomy houses, each with its plot of ground and shrubbery, sat
well back behind tinted picket-fences. But it had a frayed look
and a somewhat strained and nervous atmosphere. The more
elaborate structures were being used as official vacation places and
sanatoria; a good many had been taken over by government or-
ganizations for their officials. But many of the houses were still
in private hands. Those who had managed to hang on to a private
home through fifteen years of revolution, never certain of their
rights or tenure and tentative in their sense of ownership, were
responsible for the nervous overtones of Klyasma; they were
chiefly in-between people socially, walking the tight-rope of politi-
cal respectability.

A block or two from us, in a ramshackle clapboard house of
many rooms and dark corridors and rickety stairways, Jimmy Abbe,
the quixotic American photographer, was installed with his fam-
ily. Besides the diminutive bald-headed papa Abbe, his attractively
buxom Polly, and the three children who were destined to celebrity
through their book Around the World in Eleven Years , the
menage included the four children of Dr. Hecker, an assort-

503

DISILLUSIONMENT

504

merit of house guests, a dog or two. A Sanger Circus on the
Klyasma, as it were, noisy and hectic and irresponsible — far more
Russian in these respects than any Russian household. The Abbe
hospitality was exuberant and most catholic 3 another ill-assorted
dozen guests to share the food (bought with borrowed rubles)
meant nothing at all. Ivy Litvinov, wife of the Commissar, and
their adopted daughter were there often 3 Dr. Alcan Hirsch’s Rolls
Royce, brought from America each time he came to give the Rus-
sians his well-paid advice on matters chemical, was parked there
frequently 3 stray Russians and less routine tourists came and
went.

Spencer Williams, an ex-newspaperman in charge of the Ameri-
can-Russian Chamber of Commerce, and his wife, Caroline, were
also summering in Klyasma 3 an enthusiastic motion picture ama-
teur, Spencer came out of Klyasma with the most intimate record
of nude bathing available anywhere. The Chamberlins, a few other
Americans, and several Viennese families were scattered through
the town. Our own household entertained transient Americans,
among them, I recall, Henry Luce, proprietor of Time Magazine 3
Stanley High, preacher and publicist 3 and Alfred Stern, head of
the Rosenwald Foundation, with his charming wife, the daughter
of Julius Rosenwald. All in all, the inhabitants of Klyasma that
summer had a close-up view of foreigners and their foibles such
as few Russian towns could boast.

We shared our house, for our sins, with the director of a trust
and his family: one Panteleyev, pot-bellied and unctuous, his
ecclesiastical hair and beard (a carroty red in color and silken in
texture) trimmed to a stage version of the Old Bolshevik. The
company of these Panteleyevs, father, mother and son, was far
from edifying. But as a sociological study they were useful and
fascinating. Perfect laboratory specimens, they were, of the newly
entrenched bourgeoisie profiteering on the revolution: loud, vul-
gar, and self-centered people, greedily garnering comforts and
advantages for themselves in the name of the proletariat. Even
the oily obesity of all three seemed symbolic. The house ostensibly
belonged to the trust, freshly seized for its “workers,” but it
was occupied in expansive ease by the Panteleyevs. The automobile
that took him to and from the city, and stood always ready,
chauffeur and all, for his bidding, likewise belonged to the trust.

LIVING SPACE

505

And the sacks o£ potatoes with which he filled the cellar, at a
time when his “workers” were standing in queues for them, pre-
sumably also belonged to the trust. Eventually socialism would
give every worker a summer home, an automobile and plenty of
potatoes 3 for the present, as a beginning, Panteleyev enjoyed such
things in their name.

We rented the dacha sometime in May or June from its original
owner, a lanky and ineffectual old man named Kalishnik, who
held a semi-technical job in one of the commissariats. His wife
was a fluttery, old-fashioned little woman, as dried up as an old
pea. Both of them, trailed by an elongated son of fifteen, showed
us over the premises, every potted plant and faded armchair
spotlessly clean. The house was their little world 3 they had lived
in it these thirty years or more.

Having signed the lease entitling us to occupy the ground floor
during the summer, and having paid the rental, we considered the
matter settled. But nothing in Russia happens quite so smoothly.
In a few weeks we were privileged witnesses to one more “liquida-
tion.”

The Kalishniks, it appeared, had negotiated with a state trust
for the sale of the house. They would receive in exchange an
apartment in the city and a sum in cash. The deal, clearly, had been
dictated by these people’s fear of losing their home without com-
pensation. A preliminary and unsigned draft agreement was drawn
up. In the meantime, however, the government had taken a more
liberal tone toward private owners. The Kalishniks took heart
and called off the deal.

But they were reckoning without Comrade Panteleyev, direc-
tor of the trust. One night he arrived with his family and be-
longings and installed himself in the house, over the hysterical
protests of the owners, with nothing but the preliminary agreement
to justify the forcible occupation. Even for Russia, such direct
action seemed extreme. Had the offender been an ordinary mor-
tal, the police would have dislodged him as a matter of course.
But this was a communist, a “responsible worker” with a histrionic
coiffure, so the local police preferred not to budge him.

The Kalishniks had recourse to the courts. Either the agree-
ment was in effect, in which case the trust should provide them

506 disillusionment

with a city apartment and the specified cash consideration, or it
was ineffective, in which case the intruders would be expelled. In
the simplicity of their own hearts the Kalishniks knew that these
were the only alternatives ; and in the simplicity of my own logic
I agreed with them.

It was in the rough-and-ready courtroom of the neighboring
town of Pushkino that I had my first view of the oleomarginous
Panteleyev. He was holding forth when I arrived, in the flowing
periods of a practiced demagogue, and the three judges, one of
them a young kerchiefed girl, seemed deeply impressed. Listen-
ing to him it was hard to surmise that he was fighting to retain
a pleasant dacha for his fat wife and roly-poly boy. It was a dacha
for the “workers” of his trust that he was defending, and the
miserable Kalishniks were just bourgeois creatures with an exag-
gerated notion of private property rights. Poor Kalishnik, tremu-
lous and a little incoherent, was a sorry sight by comparison.
Where Panteleyev was prepared nobly to enjoy the house in the
name of the state, Kalishnik was trying to enjoy it and care for
it in his own name.

The court took the problem under advisement. A few days
later it confirmed Panteleyev in his “expropriation” of the prop-
erty for the “workers” of his trust. It confirmed the validity
of the tentative and unsigned agreement, but made it enforcible
only on one side. The Kalishniks were not even to receive the
promised city apartment and cash. In short, they were liquidated.
By the time we moved in, Panteleyev’s influence had succeeded in
placing the owners in prison. The technical charge against the
withered old woman, we learned, was that sne harbored an “anti-
Soviet mood,” as evidenced presumably by her hysterical objec-
tions to the loss of the only home she possessed. Against her hus-
band, Panteleyev had dug up a faded charge dating back to the
civil war days — true or false, the charge was just a convenient pre-
text for removing his melancholy face from the vicinity.

Only the boy Kolya and his dog remained, living in a sort of
outhouse, and dependent on such food as Billy gave them. A
family had been broken and scattered, a commissariat had been
robbed of one of its minor technical workers, and a boy born and
raised under the hammer and sickle had been forever embittered,

LIVING SPACE 507

in order that the “revolutionary” Panteleyev and his menage
might have a desirable dacha !

Our landlord was therefore a state trust, as personified in a
hairy ball of fat. Panteleyev was nobody’s fool. Many of the
friends who came to share the comforts of his dacha wore the
leather coats and slick boots that were almost a uniform of the
secret service. Many of them arrived in automobiles which they
were using for private recreation as proxies for their respective
groups of workers. Panteleyev chose his friends carefully ; his
kind chooses its friends from the ranks of the privileged under
any system that has ever been devised. He waited only for the
end of the summer to be rid of the embarrassing American wit-
nesses to his maneuvering. Then he would remain in sole and
complete possession of public property, where private property
had been shown its place.

One day, representatives of the Finotdyel, the finance depart-
ment of the government, arrived and made a careful inventory of
the property on the premises 5 every broken-down chair and thread-
bare carpet was listed. The personal belongings of the Kalishniks
had been confiscated for the proletariat along with their house.
This or some other Panteleyev would soon be using them for the
glory of Karl Marx.

Panteleyev was not left in doubt as to what his American tenants
thought of his unctuous hijacking. He began with a campaign of
petty persecutions which I squelched quickly enough by using some
of my own influence — influence is as efficacious a commodity under
totalitarian bureaucracy as money under capitalism. He thereupon
changed his technique and tried to make friends of us. Possibly
he had become alarmed at the likelihood of such a public record
of his methods as these pages. Once he asked me point-blank
why I didn’t like him. I told him point-blank.

Watching the Panteleyevs at lordly ease on the lawn Mrs. Kal-
ishnik had tended for thirty-odd years was an ordeal to the end
of that summer. A stout servant plied them with appetizing mor-
sels, the silken beard flowed gently in the country breeze, the
proletarian chauffeur waited for hours for their orders — the revo-
lution had triumphed over another bourgeois family and all was
well with the Panteleyevs’ world.

508

DISILLUSIONMENT

2

Among our regular guests at Klyasma, and after we returned
to town, were several American Negro boys and girls, the cynosure
of all Russian eyes wherever they went. These were the sorry
wreckage of a politico-artistic project that foundered on the rocks
of the higher diplomacy. The project, greatly ballyhooed in the
American Negro press, had envisioned a superfilm of Negro his-
tory: a sort of cavalcade of the colored race in America, its ex-
ploitation, and its stirring to proletarian class consciousness. To
this end, twenty-two American Negroes, mostly from New York’s
Harlem, were engaged and shipped to Moscow, all of them ac-
tors and actresses of extremely amateur standing. As may be sup-
posed, they were for the most part members or sympathizers
of the Communist Party. The whole undertaking seemed to them
token of the new world dawning in Russia — in Hollywood the
Negroes were sentimental mammies or clowning comics, but Mos-
cow would do justice to the epic tragedy of a race in bondage.

The arrival of the Negro group in Russia was an occasion for
editorial handsprings on the theme of minority races and their
eventual emancipation by the Comintern. A German film direc-
tor who had done a picture about Africa was selected to direct
the new film — his familiarity with African savages, by Russian
logic, equipped him to interpret Mississippi and Harlem. I read
an outline of the scenario and it seemed to me replete with ab-
surdity, profoundly ignorant of the American Negro, his psy-
chology and his problems. Nevertheless, it might have produced
some vigorous pictorial symbolism.

When news of the project reached the American press, all the
professional friends of the Soviet Union were horrified. They acted
to avoid the political catastrophe. Here they were trying to cement
Soviet-American friendship, trade and diplomatic relations, and
Moscow theorists were spoiling everything by hitting white United
States in the most tender area of its social anatomy, the Negro
problem! Such a thing was patently undiplomatic.

The Kremlin saw the point instantly. The whole undertaking
was canceled. The public — and the disgruntled Negroes — were
fed lying statements which first pretended that it was merely a

LIVING SPACE

509

postponement of the project, then blamed the abandonment upon
defects in the scenario. It was perfectly clear, however, that the
retreat was diplomatic. The interests of the U.S.S.R. as a func-
tioning state among states had collided with the interests of the
U.S.S.R. as the vanguard of world revolution. The real needs of
a real state received preference over the hoped-for revolution.

The majority of the twenty-odd Negroes were simply bewil-
dered by the bankruptcy of their plan. The disciplined communists
among them meekly took orders, signed the statements drafted
for them, and scouted around for jobs. But a minority made no
secret of its sorrow. Four of them sat in my office, sizzling with
indignation, feeling themselves insulted and betrayed.

“American race hatred has reached across the ocean and hit
us in the face,” one of them exclaimed. “Even in Soviet Russia
hatred of our people has caught up with us.”

This was the disillusionment they carried back to America,
where a few were outspoken enough on the matter. More oppor-
tunist members of the party decided that there was no use quar-
reling with a powerful government, whatever its revolutionary
slogans. They remained in Moscow, working or studying. One of
these was a slim, light-colored, and very attractive young Negress
from Harlem. Communist politics were above her head, but the
admiration and flattery of individual communists quite under-
standable. The competition for her company was keen and undis-
guised, with a prominent novelist and a prominent official of the
Foreign Office among the more eager wooers. Even a few white
Americans made a strong bid. It is to the girl’s credit that her
popularity did not go to her head 3 she played one admirer against
the other and ultimately left them all in the lurch when she
went back to Harlem.

3

The domestic spaciousness in which we had lived and enter-
tained in Moscow, that spaciousness so widely envied, so celebrated
in the folklore of the foreign colony, came to an abrupt end
in the fall of 1932. No more bourgeois amplitude and quiet
and cleanliness; now the broad corridors and marble staircase were
slimy with Moscow’s mud, now a hundred voices outshouted each
other and doors banged and strangers dashed into our living room

DISILLUSIONMENT

510

and sleeping room, now the field-like ballroom upstairs was
crowded with desks, and Shura’s lordly domain turned into a fac-
tory kitchen. Worst of all, the overgrown bathtub was liquidated,
the bathroom converted into a lunch counter.

In short, the Moscow Daily News , English-language news-
paper, was suddenly moved in on us at the Hammer mansion,
and thereafter until we left Russia it blanketed our lives.

It took nearly as large a staff and ten times as much noise to
produce this amateur four-page newspaper as it does to get out
the New York Times. Both the noise and the staff flowed in
turgid streams past our doors and overflowed our thresholds. The
Moscow Daily News was a haven of economic refuge for the more
literate Americans and Britishers wishing to remain in the Soviet
capital. Now and then, a professional journalist like Harvey O’Con-
nor or Millie Bennett joined the staff, and in the higher reaches of
its special writers were a few capable people like Anna Louise
Strong j but in overwhelming majority the staff consisted of as-
sorted British-American incompetents, with Michael Borodin, the
Colonel Lawrence of the Chinese Revolution, in charge.

My objections, however, were not to the quality of the journal
but to the fact that it was quartered upon us. In justice, it must
be attested that the Moscow Daily News felt that the United
Press and the Lyons family were quartered upon them. Dr. Ham-
mer had negotiated the transfer of the premises in great secrecy
and had undertaken rashly and in so many words to remove us
from the place. In return he received a large apartment elsewhere
and divers other considerations. But I refused to move, for the
simple and sufficient reason that I had no place to move to. The
hotels were far beyond my means and tenting on the sidewalks a
bit awkward.

Generalissimo Borodin blustered and threatened in a manner
quite unbecoming to a Historical Personage famed for diplomatic
finesse and the long view. Forcible eviction seemed in the cards,
and American cameramen stood prepared to photograph the scene
for posterity. I sent long communications to the Foreign Office
and to Ogomok , the publishing trust which issued the Moscow
Daily News, offering to vacate just as soon as they found me a
roof but not until then.

In the end, the ponderous Borodin organization decided that

LIVING SPACE

5 “

half a house was better than no ne, and for some eighteen months
we lived together, each the despair of the other. We were re-
stricted to the two small rooms on the lower floor and the cubicle
which served as United Press office. Day and night, the thunder
of a newspaper aborning and the lightning of Borodin’s irascible
generalship crackled all around us. We were an exposed and un-
protected islet of domesticity in the midst of a clamorous Soviet
enterprise.

Many members of the staff were our close friends, and sought
sanctuary occasionally on our islet. We listened to their plaints
and their gossip and were privy to the complicated intrigues and
angers and editorial fits of temper in which the English-language
daily had its being. A bevy of oversexed American females and
homosexual Englishmen had found harborage on the Moscow
Daily News (a tragically futile combination) 3 a complex strug-
gle for power went on among the Russian functionaries 3 English-
speaking technicians and tourists flocked with complaints and
schemes 3 and through it all pulsed the querulous basso of Borodin.
Despite placards marked “private,” a lot of the backwash of
that churning disorder penetrated my office and my home. In
all the months in which we shared the mansion on Petrovsky
Pereulok, I did not step into Borodin’s acreage more than four or
five times. But I could not stop Americans, having told their tales
of woe to the Daily News y from repeating them to the United
Press on the way out.

It was impossible to believe that my nervous and unmannerly
neighbor was the same Borodin who had helped to shape Chinese
history. In the preceding years I had met him socially now and
then, and been sufficiently impressed by his chunky body, his
walrus mustache, and decisive voice. I knew him at second-hand
not only from books and articles about the Chinese Revolution,
in which he had acted as Moscow’s emissary, but through the ad-
miration of the Chen children, Anna Louise Strong, and others
who had shared his Chinese experience. And now I marveled:
was this the same man who had guided the destiny of China
and organized the forces of an epochal revolution? The idea
seemed preposterous and incredible. I could only assume that
the Borodin of 1932 was the empty shell of the Borodin of 1927,
broken-down, bitter, and petty.

DISILLUSIONMENT

Our bathing facilities were now reduced to cold sponging in
our narrow corridor. Gone were the days when we invited friends
to bathe in our house 5 now it was our turn to beg a bath from
others. I became a regular client of the public baths and can claim
a more intimate knowledge of the male Russian anatomy than
any other correspondent. You left your clothes on a bench in a
cold anteroom, wondering what you would do if they disappeared
while you steamed yourself. A brass check costing a ruble en-
titled you to a vigorous soaping and drubbings you brought your
own soap, of course, and retrieved the remainder ; my foreign
brands always plucked admiring sibilants from the “rubbers.” You
gasped for breath on the lowest level in the steam-room, mar-
veling at the fortitude of Russians who remained for hours on the
uppermost shelf, whipping themselves with twigs and dousing
the red-hot oven wall to thicken the steam.

My chief amusement in the Russian bath — a kind of private
game — was to try to identify the men’s social status in their naked-
ness. Often I picked out the G.P.U. officers: even in the altogether
their manner implied a leather jacket and puttees. Recognizing
the bureaucrats was no trouble at all 3 I could practically see the
phantom brief-case under their naked wings, along with a paunch,
a trimmed beard, and a self-important gait.

In the steam-room one day, his voice coming from the fog as
though from a great distance, a Russian friend who was frequently
my bathing companion told me a famous story of Anton Chekhov’s.
That story had a bathhouse for setting and ran as follows:

Among the men on the upper shelf of the steam chamber was
an agent of the Okhrcmka y the tsar’s spy system. Though he was
off duty, his trained ear caught suspicious inflections in the voice
of one obese bearded individual. The suspect, commenting on life
and its problems, used a tone which seemed to the agent faintly
unorthodox, if only because the language was above his thick
agent’s head. “Aha!” the spy decided, “this customer will bear
watching.” When the suspect left, the agent followed. From a cor-
ner of the dressing room he watched his quarry getting slowly into
clothes, and — horror of horrors! — it turned out to be a priest.
Conscience-bitten that he should have suspected a priest, the spy
approached him, bowed low, and apologized. “Forgive me,
Father,” he said, “but I thought you had ideas!”

LIVING SPACE

513

The Chekhov story was almost worth the loss of a bathtub.
Thereafter, when the G.P.U. took some intellectual of my ac-
quaintance into custody for questioning, when an office “wall
paper” directed its irony against some hapless old man of doubtful
social origin, when the press assailed some leader on the skids,
I was able to say sagely, “Forgive them. Father, but they think
he has ideas .”

Borodin and his associates waited for me to clear out as for a
deliverance. My infidel bourgeois presence was an embarrassment.
More important, my “living space” was needed as the staff grew
from day to day. On my part, I was no less anxious to end the
enforced propinquity.

Opportunity knocked at my door. A group of Moscow’s fore-
most literary men were building a cooperative apartment on Nash-
chokinsky Pereulok. The work was slowed up by lack of trans-
portation. If only they had a few auto-trucks, one novelist sighed,
they could rush the job. There and then a kombimtsya was born:
I would provide them with enough American money to import
a truck, maybe two, and they would give me an apartment in the
cooperative house. My apartment would be ready for occupancy,
I was assured, by the November holidays, by the end of the year
at the latest.

Actually it was not completed until the spring of 1934; I was
not fated to occupy it. But I had the doubtful privilege of watch-
ing over its construction. The sum discussed was fifteen hundred
dollars; I was maneuvered into paying twenty-five hundred, just
enough to buy two American trucks through Torgsin. Having
accepted my money, the literary cooperative evidently felt that
the transaction was completed. From that point forward, for nearly
eighteen months, my every plea for action in building the apart-
ment and reasonable quality in construction was treated as an in-
trusion. A dozen times I was held up for more valuta; materials
that I bought for my apartment out of my own pocket were non-
chalantly diverted to other apartments; specifications solemnly
agreed to in the presence of Foreign Office witnesses were in-
stantly forgotten; every ounce of progress I paid for in tons of
heartache.

514 DISILLUSIONMENT

Starting as a simple bargain, the thing became as involved as
the Five Year Plan, with the Foreign Office, the Workers and
Peasants Inspection, and the G.P.U. taking a hand in the matter.
A detailed account of the juggling, struggles, negotiations and
compromises that went into the making of the home I never occu-
pied — weeks stretching into months, months into years would
require a book in itself. Luckily I was able to shift most of the
burden on the strong shoulders of a brilliant and hard-headed
young California engineer, Zara Witkin.

Having laid out the interior of the apartment for me, and
touched by my gullible helplessness in the practiced hands of the
cooperative bureaucrats, Zara assumed full charge of the proceed-
ings. While engaged upon rationalizing construction activities for
the entire Soviet Union, or supervising the construction of a great
aviation school or chemical plant, he made the time to inspect the
Lyons home in progress. No trick of faking in materials or work-
manship escaped his trained eye. Bolder, more pugnacious, and
more optimistic than I, Zara made this apartment a test case of
ratio nali zation and honesty in construction. He forced the builders
to tear down walls that were ill made, watched the mixing of
paints, insisted on elementary principles of decent workmanship.
The very sight of this calm, business-like American engineer gave
the bureaucrats the jitters.

He would listen to a long harangue of pyramided alibis, pretend
that he did not understand a word, and remark coolly, “Kho-
rosho! Now tear up this floor and do it right!” And ultimately it
was torn up.

The United Press, which now occupies that apartment, may take
pride in the fact that the mind which supervised the building of
the Hollywood Bowl and some two hundred other outstanding
California structures also supervised the building of its Moscow
headquarters.

5

Mine was not the only housing crisis — and decidedly the least
tragic. The chronic housing hardships by the end of that year were
to take a malicious turn. Some fifty million Russians, the entire
urban population, would be questioned, classified, weighed in the
social balance in the most far-reaching residential purge in Russian

LIVING SPACE 5 I 5

history, carried through with a frightful indifference to human
suffering.

For truthlessness on the grand scale, the process ranked with
liquidation of the kulaks, though the rest of the world, inured by
now to wholesale brutality, seemed scarcely aware of the thing.
Our dispatches on the edict and its pitiless enforcement never made
the front pages: editors and the public alike never quite grasped
the meaning of this nation-wide reshuffling of population. To this
day I find Americans otherwise well-informed on Soviet affairs,
including people who earn their livelihoods as Russian experts,
who seem totally unaware that an internal passport system far
more stringent than the tsaris was announced at the end of the
Five Year Plan, introduced in the following months, and is still
in force. The Stalin Constitution adopted in 1937 failed to revoke
that scourge. I have searched in vain for a mention of this system
in supposedly objective apologia for Stalinism written by foreign-
ers. (The fabulous Webbs in their 1143 pages have exactly one
reference to it — and an erroneous one — in a footnote!)

The announcement of the revival of the internal passport sys-
tem shocked the Soviet people, who by this time were not easily
shocked. For fifteen years the revolution had boasted of the aboli-
tion of passportization as one of its great accomplishments. The
boast was chiseled in large letters on the base of many a revo-
lutionary statue. The official Soviet Encyclopaedia described pass-
ports as “a practice of the tsarist government forcibly to segregate
the population, unknown in the Soviet Union.”

Now the hated instrument was restored and made more onerous.
Not since the establishment of serfdom had a Russian govern-
ment ventured to tie its subjects so securely to their places of
employment 5 indeed, one has to go back to the Middle Ages for
a European parallel. Under the Romanovs, every subject had a
passport merely for identification, to assure effective police control.
It did not restrict their right to travel or change their residence
within the Russian frontiers — except for the Jews, most of whom
were confined in the so-called Pale of Settlement.

The new Soviet passport decree went much further. It turned
every locality into a “pale” for all its inhabitants, beyond which
they could not move without the government’s explicit sanction.
The passport now issued fixed the domicile of its holder. No con -

DISILLUSIONMENT

51 6

cierge or relative could give him shelter for more than three days
without a special permit. Anyone found outside his prescribed area
could be summarily ordered to return; those harboring the stray-
ing culprit were subject to punishment.

The purge was not applied to the entire country at once. The
process required nearly a year. Beginning in the largest cities, it
was extended after a while to less important cities, then to entire
provinces and finally to the whole nation. The “undesirables” were
thus pushed ever farther from the more habitable regions, like
animals at bay surrounded by a tightening circle of hounds. Pass-
port commissions in every neighborhood interrogated the residents
and decided, on the basis of class origin and other fixed standards,
whether they were entitled to live in that city. Refusal of a pass-
port meant, after a few days allowed for an appeal, loss of housing
space and migration to some unpassported district. When the purge
reached that new district, the victims might be obliged to move
again, until they were pushed into some territory so undesirable
that everyone obtained a passport.

Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, Odessa, Vladivostok, and a few
other key cities were the first to undergo the cleansing. No one
bothered to explain what the “undesirables” were to do if they
had no place to go to and no funds to get them there. The code
of Bolshevik firmness made it “unfriendly” and counter-revolu-
tionary to raise such a “private” problem. “We can’t stop to worry
about such sentimental nonsense,” communist acquaintances said.
“They’ll get there, one way or another, or they’ll blow out their
brains. We have enough to worry about without that.”

Panic swept through every street in Moscow. Hundreds of thou-
sands who had adjusted themselves after years of travail must
again justify their warrant to remain alive. They knew that neigh-
bors with influence, perhaps on the passport commission itself, cov-
eted their corner of “living space.” The city’s population was rap-
idly approaching the four million mark. The new houses going up
did not even suffice to make up for deterioration of old structures.
It was the announced purpose of the government to expel a mil-
lion, and it actually did drive out several hundred thousand: in
effect a wholesale exile. The passport officials were pitiless, arbi-
trary, autocratic, sparing neither the very aged nor the very young,
not even bed-ridden invalids.

LIVING SPACE

517

An epidemic of suicides spread through the capital. Naturally
the press said nothing about this, but communists privately esti-
mated them in the hundreds. Scarcely a day passed but I heard
the details of some family denied a passport and choosing death
as the only remaining alternative. What was true of Moscow was
true in a hundred other cities.

My friend Isaak Lvovich came to me one day in utter despair.
Though he was a highly paid technician in an important trust, he
had been denied a passport by his local commission. His household,
besides a wife and four young children, included a father of nearly
eighty and a crippled niece. His was the taint of Nepmanism eight
or nine years back.

“Unless my appeal is granted,” he said, “I must move them
all somewhere — God knows where or how. ... In what city can
I possibly find housing for my family? It seems easier to end it
all . . . eight bullets and my problem is solved. . . . My Nep
past has little to do with it. We have three rooms and a separate
kitchen. Someone with influence wants that space.”

Only one in a hundred ever obtained a reversal of the commis-
sion’s decision. Because Isaak Lvovich was extremely valuable to
his trust, and its director happened to be a courageous communist,
he was that one in a hundred. A few days lated he phoned to
invite us to a party. He was celebrating the receipt of a passport,
as though it were a commutation of the death sentence. His joy
was well-nigh hysterical.

Passportization, coinciding with the sharpened food shortage
everywhere and the beginning of famine in south Russia, with an-
other stringent purge of the Communist Party ranks, and the worst
record for industrial production of any year since 1923 (8
instead of the 37% planned), provided a most inauspicious back-
ground for the launching of a second Piatiletka.

Indeed, the moment was far more critical than anyone outside
the highest circle of power suspected ; disclosures in the next five
years have made this clear. Half the country was starving, as we
shall see; the rest was on extremely short rations. No amount of
bluster could speed up the workers, since sheer physical debilita-
tion was at the root of the trouble. Secret anti-Stalin documents
were being passed from hand to hand among important commu-
nists ; one of these, written by the well-known communist Riutin

5 I 8 DISILLUSIONMENT

in prison, boldly called for Stalin’s removal. Among more idealistic
young people in the Comsomol organization there was guarded
talk of terror against tyrants. The diary of Nikolaiev, the young
communist who assassinated Kirov on December i, 1934 ? b as never
been published; but one who read it has revealed that it reflects
the desperate mood of a large portion of youth as the Plan drew
to its tragic conclusion. Subsequent charges of terrorism and anti-
Stalin conspiracy which in 1936-37 were to bring dozens of Old
Bolsheviks and military leaders, as well as hundreds of rank-and-
file communists, before the firing squad, grew in the main out
of the crisis at this juncture.

“This was the end of 1932, when the situation in the country
was similar to 1921 — the time of the Kronstadt rebellion,” an Old
Bolshevik was to write in a letter smuggled out and published
anonymously abroad.* “In 1932, it is true, there were no actual
revolts, but many believed that it would have been better if the
government had had to deal with actual revolts.”

On December 27, 1932 — in the very last week of the Plan, that
is — it was decreed that every Soviet worker surrender his pass-
port or other identification documents to the administration; in
case of a “disciplinary” dismissal — for one day’s absence from
work, for instance — the administration must inscribe that fact on
the document. No other state institution was allowed to employ
a worker with such a black mark for six months after his dismis-
sal; in the meantime he lost his rations and sometimes his home.
The proletarian’s role by the end of the Five Year Plan had
been reduced to silent obedience, with starvation as the only alter-
native.

* Letter of an Old Bolshevik, Rand School Press, New York, 1937.

X. American Tragedies

BECAUSE of the absence of diplomatic relations between the
U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., every American correspondent, to his
infinite annoyance, became an unofficial diplomat in the eyes of
Americans in trouble. I was constantly being maneuvered into
interceding for Americans who had lost their passports, or were
being forcibly detained on Soviet soil, or were trying to pull a
Russian wife out of the country. An ill-gained repute for tender-
heartedness won me more than my normal share of these prob-
lems. More hard-boiled colleagues were inclined to shunt trouble-
some countrymen — unless they were countrywomen endowed with
pulchritude — to Petrovsky Pereulok. And on occasion, if the truth
be told, I wished such annoyances on some colleague. The tech-
nique was to assure the frenzied petitioner modestly that Duranty
or Barnes or Fischer, as the case might be, was a person of much
greater influence in high quarters and could consequently help
.more effectively. By way of insurance, it was best to add: “But
you’d better not tell him I sent you. . . .”

The fact is that none of us was a match for the devious and
illogical ways of bureaucracy. The most we could do was to em-
ploy the threat of publicity in the American press in breaking
through the barricades of rules and regulations.

One morning, for instance, I received a yard-long cablegram
from a friend in New York, invoking my help in the following
circumstances. An American furniture manufacturer while touring
the Soviet Union met a personable young lady in Odessa and
fell in love with her; the furniture he manufactured being ex-
ceedingly modernistic, he may be forgiven this romantic deviation.
His love brought him back to Russia and Odessa for a second
visit, and on this occasion he married the girl and applied for an
exit visa for her. Local officials stalled him week after week with
vague promises and finally he had to return alone. He continued
the efforts to get her out for months by long distance, without

5i9

DISILLUSIONMENT

520

success. Meanwhile it appeared that he had left his wife in what
used to be called “an interesting condition.” The gentleman was
naturally much distressed and begged that I “do something.”

Upon making certain inquiries in Odessa, I discovered that the
Russian bride, soon after the American’s departure, had been ar-
rested for reasons that I could not ascertain. Reasons are not im-
portant in Russia anyhow — the circumstance that she was of bad
birth (that is, good birth old-style) and had associated with a
foreigner may have had something to do with it.

I thereupon consulted my typewriter and what emerged was
a cable dispatch about love and passports. The gist of it was that
the Russian bride of an American business man, a bride who would
soon be a mother, languished in prison while the heartbroken
bridegroom and father-to-be fought for her release. This lugu-
brious tale I laid with a straight face upon the desk of his highness
the censor. The censor read it and blanched in the two spots on
his face not covered by beard. This decidedly was not the sort
of story he cared to have spread on record in the American news-
papers.

I pretended astonishment at his astonishment. “Why, this is
just an innocent little human-interest yarn of the sort dear to the
American heart. No one denies you have a right to jail Soviet
citizens even if they’re pregnant and married to Americans.”

He looked at me in a way that made further discussion super-
fluous. “Just leave it with me, Mr. Lyons, and we’ll ascertain the
facts.” Next day I telephoned to inquire whether the facts had
been ascertained, ditto the day after that. On the third day the
censor’s voice had an optimistic lift to it.

“I’ll have some news for you on that story, I think, in a few
hours.”

That afternoon he phoned to say that the story was untrue 3
the lady had been released from jail and had, in fact, been given
an exit visa. I had never had the slightest intention of cabling that
story, of course.

The news that Russia had liquidated unemployment and was
in dire need of labor power brought hundreds of foreign job
hunters to Moscow. Most of them arrived as third-category tour-
ists, lived lordly tourist lives for the five or ten days specified,

AMERICAN TRAGEDIES

521

then found themselves penniless, homeless and jobless in the cita-
del of socialism. Even where they had specific mechanical trades,
only one in a hundred managed to cut through the jungles of
red-tape around Soviet jobs. Many of them had sold their last
belongings to make the trip, certain that the new society waited
for them with open arms.

By 1931-32, these hordes of stranded Americans became a real
problem. There was an American worker who had come with a
young son to start life anew in his socialist fatherland. His last
dollar was gone. At the time the correspondents learned of their
plight, they had been sleeping in corridors for ten days and gone
without food for days at a time, shuttling in despair between one
Soviet office and another, begging work. Others were quartered
upon already overcrowded American homes — one woman came to
spend a night at the Lyons menage and remained for eight
months!

Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald Tribime y whose journa-
listic courage was always a notch or two higher than the Musco-
vite average (a fact that did not make him too popular in certain
official areas), was the first to write a dispatch about the American
derelicts on Soviet shores. Other correspondents followed his lead.
These stories led the government to issue the sensible order that
all tourist tickets must be round-trip and Soviet agents abroad
were instructed to make it clear that no one arriving on a tourist
visa could remain in the U.S.S.R. to work.

An increasing number of Russian-Americans, also, found them-
selves virtual prisoners in the land of their birth, and turned
hopefully to the correspondents for help. The victims were almost
always humble, meek, friendless individuals whose failure to return
to the land of their adoption was not likely to excite American
public opinion. Not a single instance came to my knowledge of
an American of Russian origin with money, education and influ-
ential friends in the U.S.A. being claimed as a Russian by the
Soviet government. Those naturalized Americans whose passports
were summarily confiscated were poor, simple, scared workers.

Legally and technically, the Soviet authorities were apparently
well within their rights. American naturalization does not wipe
out the prior claim of a person’s native land. This issue has often
arisen in relation to alien-born Americans in other countries and

DISILLUSIONMENT

522

has been adjusted in some instances in special treaties. In Russia,
there were a number o£ themes strictly taboo for reporters who
cared to live on more or less amicable terms with the authorities,
and “captured” Americans was one of them. A large proportion
of the profitable tourist trade consisted of Americanized Russians
returning for a glimpse of their homelands. Publicity about con-
fiscated passports would have endangered this lucrative trade and
the Press Department made it clear that such stories would be
considered “unfriendly” acts. For years I tried, as did one or two
others, to elicit a clear-cut statement of policy in this respect. If
the Soviet government stood four-square on its rights to claim
every Russian-born American at will, we argued, it was our duty
as correspondents to report the fact, if only as a warning to
Russian-Americans. Our efforts came to nothing.

The taboo was finally broken through as a result of a particu-
larly tragic case of such citizen-snatching. A California machinist
born in Russia but raised in America since boyhood accepted a job
in Russia. Being a widower, he brought two American-born chil-
dren with him. His passport was taken up on arrival and his every
attempt to regain possession failed. After a year or so of procrasti-
nation, he was informed that he was considered a Soviet citizen.
Perpetual exile from America had been no part of his intention
in accepting Soviet employment, and the prospect of his children
— typical American youngsters — growing up as Russians appalled
him. The fellow had more than ordinary courage, and raised a
howl heard by all the correspondents. The refusal of Russian offi-
cials to grant exit visas for the American-born children, in par-
ticular, riled us.

Several of us took the matter up with the Foreign Office but
got no satisfaction. I thereupon proposed to Duranty’s temporary
substitute that for once we send stories on the subject. Being less
of a diplomat than his boss, he saw the facts in newspaper terms
as “a swell story,” and by agreement we mailed our dispatches
to London, whence they were cabled to America. The American
passport was restored soon thereafter.

The most pathetic category of Americans held in Russia against
their will were those who had voluntarily given up American citi-
zenship through communist patriotism, then changed their minds.
Most of them were Russian by birth, but a few were native-born

AMERICAN TRAGEDIES

5 2 3

Americans or natives of other European nations. Having escaped
the iniquitous capitalist world and embraced the socialist dream,
they threw away American citizenship — joyously, defiantly — as
though casting off chains. The period of disillusionment ranged
from two weeks to a year, and the embittered regrets were in
direct proportion to the fervor of the original renunciation. It was
the finality of their act, the realization that they were trapped and
held and could never leave Russia again, which worked on these
people, even more than their disillusionment with the U.S.S.R.
They would come to my office, or the office of some other Ameri-
can, and weep bitter tears. We could offer them nothing but sym-
pathy.

When an American Embassy was eventually opened, its first
and largest headache was the adjustment of hundreds of these
passport cases.

The love element in our amateur diplomatic work was provided
by the American engineers, resident salesmen for American manu-
facturers, and others who had acquired Russian wives only to
find, when the moment for departure came, that they could not
take those wives along. A few foreigners of exceptionally influ-
ential standing managed to obtain exit visas for their Russian loves,
but the average mortal could not. Americans, without an embassy
to intercede for them, were especially helpless under such circum-
stances.

I could fill a book with the strange tales of Russian-American
romances in which a most unromantic Soviet passport office figured
as the villain of the piece. I knew several cases in which lonesome
Americans took women into their homes knowing that they were
little more than prostitutes and spies, but took them in time into
their hearts as well, married them, and fought long and tragic
battles to extricate them from the U.S.S.R.

Why the Soviet regime in the Stalin era has been, and still
remains, so uncompromising in its determination to prevent its
subjects from emigrating has never been clear to me. I have heard
all the semi-official explanations and guesses, but they sound un-
convincing. The most common alibi is that the emigrants might
be unable to find work and become a burden on some foreign
nation. This solicitude is hard to swallow ; it is particularly un-

DISILLUSIONMENT

5^4

convincing in relation to tens of thousands with families abroad
eager to care for them. Another explanation offered is that the
U.S.S.R. could not spare labor power — a strange reason, certainly,
for holding thousands of aged and decrepit people eager to join
relatives abroad, or tens of thousands of disfranchised persons who
were not given the right to work.

More candid officials did not resort to such palpably lying
explanations. They admitted that if the gates of their country
were opened, hundreds of thousands and possibly millions would
leave. They would naturally be the most dissatisfied elements
and would therefore be a potential source of anti-Soviet propa-
ganda. The myth of a happy, busy, socialist nation and an enthu-
siastic population might be punctured. A communist friend whom
I pressed on the subject finally blurted out:

“Why should the bastards who hate us be allowed to get out
of our control? And why should they be exempted when the rest
of us are starving and suffering for the future? They’ll stay right
here and suffer with us ! ”

Whatever the reason for locking the Russian people into their
country, it seemed to turn the U.S.S.R. into a dungeon. It helped
to make “abroad” the most glamorous word, the greatest gift
within the power of the Kremlin.

2

The point of poor Larry’s experiences in Russia is blurred un-
less one knows Esther, the wife who remained behind in America.
Larry is a chirping and pleasant little man, very intelligent in
an academic fashion but a little helpless in practical matters. Esther,
being a large and capable and energetic female, complements him
completely. It was Esther who supported the family when I first
met them, while Larry studied engineering; that was when she
worked with me for the Sacco-Vanzetti defense in Boston. I saw
them at long intervals in the following years and she was still
the generalissimo of the family.

They are both “idealists” — their common interest in righting
the wrongs of the world, indeed, is one of the strongest bonds
between them. Their ideals, like themselves, are on different
planes, Esther’s rather professional and Larry’s on a more rarefied

AMERICAN TRAGEDIES 525

level. Even the study of civil engineering had its idealistic over-
tones for them. True, it would enable him to make a living and
one must eat. But that was incidental. The important consideration
was that the Russian revolution had need of trained technical
minds and his profession would enable him to make a “valuable
contribution” to the great cause.

While he was still in school, back in 1921, this vision of helping
Russia invested the studies with a deeper social significance. Just
as soon as he was eligible he joined the various societies for tech-
nical aid to the Soviet government and wrote weighty papers on
engineering under socialist conditions. The troubles the revolution
was having with its technical personnel (to a degree which obliged
the Kremlin to shoot and jail thousands of them, mind you) only
strengthened Larry’s and Esther’s certainty that in preparing a
trustworthy revolutionary engineer for Russia they were doing
their important bit for humanity.

But for one reason and another — lack of money, the arrival of
babies — Larry didn’t actually get to the U.S.S.R. in construction
until the Five Year Plan was far under way. He made his con-
tract with Amtorg in New York and set off joyously to consum-
mate the dream of a lifetime. Esther remained in America with
the babies on the understanding that as soon as he was nicely set-
tled in Moscow they would join him. Meanwhile, he would send
them part of his earnings. The contract gave him five hundred
rubles a month, an apartment and other privileges. Surely he
would not need all of $250 a month (that’s how he thought of
the rubles) and a large slice would go to Esther.

I heard that Larry was in Moscow, and though I pretended to
be amused by his failure to visit me I was a bit hurt underneath.
But I could understand his shyness. After all I was a bourgeois
correspondent, and had the “wrong attitude” toward the revo-
lution. Personal friendships must be sacrificed to the cause.

Four or five weeks after he had reached the Soviet land, how-
ever, lo and behold! Larry was on my threshold, the same diminu-
tive, chirping and helpless Larry we had known in Boston. There
was that forbidden-fruit look on his face that other American
communists wore when impelled by distress or affection to enter
a home contaminated by bourgeois ideology. Larry began on a
note of affection but soon shifted to his distress. He didn’t tell

526 DISILLUSIONMENT

me all his troubles at once, obviously hoping that some of them
would be dissipated. But he returned frequently and soon I was
privy to all his worries, and there were plenty of them.

“You see, Gene, the five hundred rubles aren’t as much as I
supposed. Of course, I’d read articles by a lot of counter-revo-
lutionaries like yourself that talked of inflation, but I knew that
was just capitalist propaganda. The Soviet journals ridiculed any
suggestion that the ruble was worth less than fifty cents. The fact
is”- — he lowered his voice and looked around for eavesdroppers —
“that in purchasing power my salary is really less than ten bucks
a month. . . . But naturally you know that. It’s even worse than
that: I can’t send a penny of it home, because it seems rubles can’t
be exported and wouldn’t be worth anything if they were ex-
ported.”

“But, Larry, didn’t you know that much about Russia? You — a
close student of Soviet affairs!”

“I studied those affairs too much in the columns of the Daily
Worker, the New Masses, the New Refublic, and The Nation,
I’m afraid,” he sighed.

His promised “apartment” did not materialize, and he was
living in a filthy barracks, in a room with half a dozen Russian
technicians working with him in the railroad commissariat. A cor-
ner in a private home for which he negotiated would have cost
him more than half his entire salary!

“The real trouble,” he said, “is that they somehow won’t treat
me like a foreigner. The engineers who are here for the money,
as out-and-out bourgeois specialists, get attention, and most of
them had sense enough to make contracts in dollars. But I’m a
communist, one of their own people so to speak, and they treat
me like a Russian.”

“Well, why don’t you tell them to go fly a kite and return
to New York?”

And then he told me the most serious disaster. It seems that
he was Russian-born and had received strong hints that his Ameri-
can passport, which had been taken up by the authorities when
he first arrived, might never be returned. He had met several
other Russian-American enthusiasts who had. been trying for
months and years to regain possession of their American pass-
ports. Technically he was a Russian, and if his Soviet hosts were

AMERICAN TRAGEDIES 5 2 7

that way minded he might never be allowed to leave their hos-
pitality. The possibility threw him into a panic.

“I want to make a confession. Gene, and a humble apology,”
he suddenly interrupted himself. “God knows, I owe it to you.
It’s no secret to you what your radical friends in America are
saying about you. They think that you’re a renegade, that you’re
ly ing about conditions in Russia. You might as well know that
I was one of the most outspoken in the attacks on you. It seemed
to me that you were betraying the revolution.

“Well, I’ve been here more than two months now, and I can
testify that you are in fact a liar, a lot more so than I suspected.
But you’re lying for Russia, not against it. The things you write
are mild and pussyfooting compared with the truth that I am
seeing with my own eyes.”

“How does Esther take your disappointments?”

Larry went pale. He wrung his hands. Among his multitudi-
nous troubles, Esther was by all odds the most serious.

“Esther doesn’t know about it,” he said. “I realized right away
that all my incoming letters are being read, and I’ve learned
enough to suspect that the same applies to outgoing mail. With
my passport in their hands and all, I don’t dare write the truth.
Maybe it’s nerves, but they have me completely scared. Poor
Esther can’t understand why I write so little — she sends me a
letter every day! — and why I don’t answer the thousand questions
she asks about life here. And I can’t tell her. ... I just keep
on repeating that everything is all right and it’s wonderful to be
in the Soviet Union at last and that sort of thing. . . . I’m sure
the poor girl can’t make out what’s happened to her Larry. It’s
all perfectly terrible.”

One day he arrived greatly upset, to show me a cablegram from
Esther, received several days earlier. She was not the woman to
be dillydallied with. She wanted to know immediately when she
should start out for Moscow. She was all ready.

“You know Esther,” Larry said in a choking voice, “she’ll sell
our last belongings and come over. For all I know she s on her
way now!”

“Well, why don’t you wire her not to budge?”

“I did, but she cabled right back wanting to know why— and
I couldn’t tell her.”

528 DISILLUSIONMENT

When he left, he was calmer. We had drafted a message warn-
ing her not to do anything until she got his next letter. I under-
took to send that letter out in the diplomatic pouch of a friendly
courier, and Larry at last was able to tell his Esther the whole
truth.

He now had only one purpose in life — to obtain his passport
and a permit to depart. In a few months, he achieved this.
Whether he risked ostracism by his friends, all of them commu-
nists and near-communists, by telling them why he did not work
out his contract or import his family I have no way of knowing.
Perhaps, back home in depression America, he drifted back into
the hosanna-singing fraternity.

3

I have mentioned Zara Witkin. There was little in our first
meeting to hint that our paths would run parallel for two years
and that I should become involved emotionally in his soul-searing
experience. That experience was intensely personal, yet it came to
have for me, and for him too, a symbolic quality in relation to
the whole Soviet scene.

In the forefront of Zara’s life in Russia was his fantastic tug-of-
war with the Soviet bureaucracy, a struggle in which Stalin him-
self at one point took a hand. Behind that was the stranger secret
drama of his love affair with his Dark Goddess. And behind these
were depths upon depths of intrigue: vast unseen and unfeeling
forces playing with human lives as though they were pebbles.
Somehow this intricate pattern of one man’s experience— cold
engineering, feverish romance, and an impersonal and pervasive
cruelty — seemed an epitome of Bolshevik Russia.

A dark, chunky, broad-shouldered young man with a warm
smile and tanned, open features, Zara came to me one day in the
spring of 1932 with a letter of introduction. He had come to
Russia to give himself unreservedly to the task of Soviet con-
struction. He had given up a position as chief engineer of one of
the largest American building firms for that purpose. But because
he offered his knowledge and talents without demanding gold, the
Soviet officials looked askance at him. In this land presumably
translating an ideal into reality, nothing was more suspect than

AMERICAN TRAGEDIES $2g

idealism. It seemed to them incredible and even suspicious that
an American engineer should give up a good income at home for
the sheer joy of helping build a new world. A perverted material-
ism had bitten so deeply into their minds that disinterested de-
votion to a cause looked to them like quixotic sentimentality.

In the end, however, he found work. Then began his fight
against the bureaucrats. Entrenched officials resented his advice,
which cut too deeply into their pretenses and inefficiency. His plans
were side-tracked. Month after month he struggled to introduce
a measure of elementary good sense into the construction process,
to rescue his plans from pigeon-holes, to save the government mil-
lions of rubles by rationalizing various technical procedures.

Before he was through, part of the press was tugging on his
side of the rope, and finally Stalin himself added his not incon-
siderable weight on the American’s side. Zara was entrusted with
drawing up a plan for the rationalization of the entire construc-
tion industry of the Soviet Union: the most important assignment
given to any single foreign specialist. At the same time he was
made consultant on a number of the most critical building jobs
in the aviation industry and other branches of the national defense.

Not even Izvestia and Stalin could budge the entrenched bu-
reaucracy more than a few inches. Tens of thousands of incom-
petents were too deeply rooted in their places to give way; their
survival depended on the continuation of an intricate system of
inefficiency. But it was a lusty battle which I followed closely and
in which I sometimes took a part.

Parallel with this struggle, becoming eventually a part of it,
was the engineer’s amazing love affair. Not until we had met a
dozen times or more did he confide to me his love for the woman
whom he called the Dark Goddess. He had never met her!

Several years before he had seen a Soviet motion picture in
which Russia’s best-known cinema actress, Emma Cessarskaya, had
a role. Emma is beautiful with that healthy, earthy, peasant beauty
one sees occasionally in Russian paintings: a vital, deep-bosomed
and fertile beauty beyond mere comeliness. Zara fell in love with
her. He wrote to her but received no reply.

Long before this he had dreamed of going to the Soviet land
and of working for the joy of it rather than profit. That dream
now acquired a new dimension of passionate consecration. This

530 DISILLUSIONMENT

woman seemed to him the new Russia incarnate. He never doubted
that he would find her and that she would respond to his love.

His instincts were correct. Billy and I helped him to meet
Emma, and they became inseparable companions. From Emma’s
love he drew the strength for his fight against the bureaucrats
he was doing it for her country. He taught her English and to-
gether they read the letter he had sent her from Los Angeles it
had been unopened all these years!

Often they were at our house. Emma grew very fond of Billy.
It was pleasant to see Zara and his goddess together; he so solemn
and protective in his happiness, Emma gay and full of the devil.
Occasionally the two of them called me into serious conference.
They were planning ways and means of joining the strands of
their lives forever — in America. On those occasions there was an
undercurrent of fear and sadness which not all of Emma’s gaiety
could disperse. They knew, as I did, that larger forces must be
propitiated. Moscow would not willingly give up its greatest
cinema actress to a foreigner and to America.

It is almost blasphemous to tell the story so briefly. But suffice
that the enemies Zara had made in insisting upon bringing a little
order into the chaos of the construction industry struck back at
him through Emma. After some eight months during which they
met daily, Emma was snatched away from him. His every effort
to get to her was frustrated. Several times he talked to her by
telephone. She begged him in a panic not to call her, to accept
the inevitable. He understood that she was under some terrific
fear, and helpless.

For months thereafter he remained in Moscow, in the grip of
a deep despair. (Ultimately he and I returned to the United States
together.) The G.P.U. exploited his tragedy in an unsuccessful
attempt to inveigle him into its network of spies. His plan for
the rationalization of construction, other work done with the
knowledge and encouragement of Stalin, all turned out so much
futile flailing of water.

XI. Persian Entr’acte

I WAS talking to Billy by long-distance telephone to Berlin,
where she awaited my arrival. I was all packed for a vacation.

“Hello, darling,” I said, “I am leaving tomorrow — ”

“That’s swell!”

“Hold on. Not so swell. . . . Pm leaving tomorrow, but not
for Berlin. I’m going to Persia.”

“Going where?”

“To Persia — Teheran.”

I repeated it twice more before she grasped the direction of
my sudden assignment.

“And listen,” I said. “Keep this thing under your hat. We
don’t want any of the opposition to get wind of it. My instruc-
tions are to get there, get there quick, and get there first.”

Late that night Billy called me back.

“That Persia secret of yours,” she said, “is all over town here.
I no sooner stepped into the Adlon bar than the whole gang
wanted to know about your trip to Persia. I had to pretend it
was all news to me. Lucky thing I’m a first-rate liar!”

The Shah of Persia, that swashbuckling trooper who ousted an
old dynasty and made himself King of Kings, had just canceled
the D’Arcy Concession under which the Anglo-Persian Oil Com-
pany operated its Persian fields. With its prestige in the Near
East threatened, the British lion was obliged to do some lusty
roaring. Its fleet east of the Suez was maneuvered suggestively
and the London press talked of war-like measures.

Whether or not this bellicose show impressed His Majesty at
Teheran, it impressed their majesties of the United Press suffi-
ciently to rush their Moscow correspondent to the Persian capital.
On the map, Persia is deceptively near Moscow, though a re-
porter flying from Paris or Rome could have gotten there sooner.
Of course, there was a distinct Soviet angle to the story. The
Russian bear and the British lion had shared dominance of Persia

53i

DISILLUSIONMENT

53 ^

between them before the war, and were still sparring for advan-
tages. In some London quarters, the question was asked whether
Moscow might have encouraged the Shah to defy the British.

In the interests of their political health, many governments,
Persia among them, made it a rule not to issue visas in Russia
to non-Russians. My friends in the Persian Legation declared
themselves helpless against this rule 5 that necessitated cables
among Moscow, London, New York, Washington, and Teheran,
which multiplied in geometrical progression but summed up to
precisely nothing. I left for Baku without a visa and exacted one
by sheer force of desperation from the local Persian consul, just
in time to catch the weekly boat across the Caspian Sea to Enzeli
(now Pahlevi).

The three days 5 trip from Moscow to Baku was raucous with
Soviet culture. Radios had been installed on this important rail-
road line 3 loud speakers in the corridor flooded our lives and
drowned our thoughts with classic caterwauling and distorted lec-
tures. In the coupe adjoining mine, an Armenian member of the
government (his beribboned insignia of office as large as an usher’s
at a ball) set up a gramophone in competition to the radio. He
played three cracked records of ancient dance tunes hours on end.
Before the trip was over, I succeeded in switching this official’s
enthusiasm from Western music to Armenian cognac by the simple
expedient of sharing it with him. This not only helped to silence
his gramophone but fortified my nerves against the overdose of
corridor culture.

Our train went through an area already in the tightening grip
of hunger, and even important government dignitaries, if mel-
lowed by native cognac, allow themselves caustic comments on
the trend of national affairs. The morale of the Russian people
was clearly at its lowest ebb in this final month of the Five Year
Plan. What one sensed, cutting diagonally across the country,
pausing at stations, talking guardedly to people on the train, was
something far more depressing than discontent — physical and
moral debilitation, hopelessness, impotence, and sickly despair.
There was none of the eager and angry argument in excited knots
of people that I had watched in my first trip through this general
area four years earlier. Where there had been ferment, I now
found flatness. Where peasants had clamored to sell food, they

Persian entr’acte 533

now begged weakly for a hand-out. The restaurant counters in
station waiting-rooms offered only anemic tea and gritty, fly-
specked biscuits at absurdly high prices. Construction jobs, of which
we saw many, seemed forlorn and lackadaisical.

From Baku to the Persian coast was an overnight journey due
south. Enzeli, on the northern brim of Persia, is a sleepy down-
at-heel place. What struck me at first sight, after Russia, was
the incredible abundance of food: pomegranates and lemons, stacks
of flat bread disks, goat cheese and mutton. The madness of a
world where children languish with hunger a night’s distance
from such abundance!

At the customs house, at the damp and chilly hotel, everywhere,
I looked into the strong, unsmiling face of the self-made Shah 5
his picture was as ubiquitous here as Stalin’s in Russia. Always he
was shown in the semi-profile that emphasized his large eagle-
beak nose and beetling eyebrows. The hope of interviewing Riza
Shah Pahlevi, the royal dictator of this ancient empire, had been
born in my mind the moment I received the assignment. I knew
that he had not submitted to an interview by an out-and-out news-
paper reporter since he mounted the Peacock Throne. The hope
seemed so remote that I did not mention it to my editors, but it
was the obbligato to my thoughts. I remembered reading how
Larry Rue and Richard Halliburton and other distinguished col-
leagues had fought for such an audience and failed, and trusted
that my luck might outweigh their skill.

Between Enzeli and Teheran are the majestic Elburz Moun-
tains, with one defile that mounts gradually to a snow-covered
plateau more than eight thousand feet above the Caspian level.
I hired a dilapidated car driven by a taciturn and most unprepos-
sessing chauffeur. Toward sunset we reached the flattened peak:
a limitless world of shimmering white, snow and sky. We were in
luck 3 the road, which had been blocked by snowdrifts, was pass-
able. Soon we were in the picturesque, unreal streets of Kavsin,
and toward midnight we passed through a gate in the mosaicked
wall of Teheran.

Despite the hour, the American Minister, Charles D. Hart,
insisted that I visit the Legation residence immediately. I found
him charming and generously helpful. The soft rugs, the cheerful
fire in the grate, and a few tall drinks thawed the pessimism in-

DISILLUSIONMENT

534

duced by the wearing mountain journey, and I confided my hope
of talking to the Shah. Himself a former Washington correspon-
dent, Mr. Hart was sympathetic but advised against wasting my
energies in reaching for the moon.

The next few weeks were crowded with work. The only full-
fledged American correspondent on the scene, I made the most
of the opportunity. The Persian events had meanwhile been
pushed off the front pages, but that only made the need for out-
of-the-ordinary stories more pressing. I obtained the only inter-
view on the oil controversy with His Highness Mohammed Khan
Foroughi, Minister of Foreign Affairs (later Premier)— an urbane
black-bearded gentleman who spoke an excellent English. I talked
with British oil executives, foreign diplomats, Persian journalists.
Quickly enough, I discovered that the whole dispute— the annul-
ment, threats and posturings on both sides— amounted to a haggle
over the government’s royalty percentages on the oil profits; the
shouting and rug-waving about Persian independence was political
decoration of very secondary importance.

Few thin gs in life give me more joy than the feeling of putting
my mental teeth into a new situation, trying to crack its shell of
appearances for the meat of reality. If I crack my teeth instead,
what of it? My very ignorance of Persian affairs made the attempt
more exciting. I picked up a keen-witted and energetic secretary-
interpreter named Musa: a Persian Jewish lad educated in the
American schools run by Christian missions and a convert to the
new religion of Bahai. My genuine interest in his lectures on sal-
vation through Bahai won Musa’s heart, and he worked with me
cheerfully night and day.

The country is still semi-feudal. Entire villages and districts are
owned and ruled by hereditary lords. Though Riza Shah has dong
much to undermine the power of tribal chieftains, the feudal rela-
tionship has not been broken. On top of this feudal society, how-
ever, the government is imposing modern industrialization, sub-
sidizing manufacture, building mills and railroads with the help
of foreign technical specialists. In talking to officials and “Western-
ized” Persians, I was continuously impressed by the essential
parallel of their enthusiasms with those I knew in Russia. It was
not of Iranic art and traditions that they boasted, but of the new
cement mixing plant erected outside Teheran, the new railroad

Persian entr’acte 535

mileage added by the Shah, and the progress in unveiling their
women. The urge to industrialize was no Leninist invention. The
whole East felt it, finding local slogans to express the self-same
desire for the West’s machines and comforts. For Western demo-
cratic government, too, Persians expressed a high enthusiasm,
though — as the President of the Medjlis , or parliament, put it to
me — “Democracy is a luxury we Persians cannot as yet afford.”

2

The possibility of interviewing the Shah seemed more remote
the closer I came to Persia and its leaders. The mere suggestion
shocked officials. His Majesty’s Minister of the Court, Timur Tash,
had been, ever since the Kadjar dynasty was kicked off the throne,
the closest adviser of the new ruler. He was a Grand Vizier in the
ancient tradition: wise, magnificent, powerful. When he consented
to see me, I felt that the first big step towards the Shah was
already accomplished. At the appointed hour, I arrived at Timur
Tash’s palace, but His Highness was not there. The explanation
that he had suddenly taken sick seemed to me a low and trans-
parent alibi. His secretaries were embarrassed and flustered. They
shrugged their shoulders and assured me that the Minister was
not only sick but would remain sick at least for some months.
Indignantly I drove to Timur Tash’s residential estate, half an
hour outside town, to insist on my journalistic pound of flesh,
only to receive the same evasive apologies.

The fact was that his agreement to receive me was the Grand
Vizier’s last official act. That night he was placed by his master
under house arrest. If I lost my conference with him, at any rate
I was the first foreigner to learn of his downfall, and to report it
to the outside world. Subsequently Timur Tash was transferred
to prison, where he died under mysterious circumstances some six
months later.

Only the Minister of Foreign Affairs, it now seemed, might
force a path for me to His Majesty. H. H. Foroughi was sympa-
thetic but not encouraging. After a week or so of trying, lie an-
nounced formally and definitely that the Shah-an-Shah would not
talk. It was then that I resorted to an obvious and therefore
neglected technique: the same technique that had helped me into

530 DISILLUSIONMENT

Stalin’s presence. I went directly to the Shah. With Musa’s assist-
ance, I wrote a letter to His Majesty, as flowery and humble as
an Arabian Nights petition, and took certain measures to assure
its safe delivery at the Pahlevi Palace.

Then I made arrangements to return to Moscow. Two days be-
fore my scheduled departure H. H. Foroughi informed me that
His Majesty had graciously changed his mind and would receive
me in audience after all.

The interview was set for ten in the morning. For nearly forty-
eight hours I worried myself into a nervous state over the “pro-
tocol” of royal audiences in the Orient. I could borrow the formal
clothes from friendly diplomats, but where could I borrow the
skill to bow as the protocol described, the forms of address, and
—most frightening of all— the art of backing out from the royal
presence? Anyone who thinks backing out is easy need only try it!
By chance I dined with Prince Amir Esmail Malek Monsour Kad-
jar, a member of the “liquidated” dynasty, first cousin of the last
Kadjar Shah, on the evening before my interview. Persian liqui-
dations being less thorough than in the neighboring Russia, Prince
Esmail was not only alive but lived in a run-down and depressing
palace next-door to the new Shah who had kicked his family off
the throne. When I mentioned casually, over the rice-and-mutton,
that I was to visit Shah Pahlevi next morning, the prince and his
friends became as excited as schoolboys.

Far from harboring any grudge against the interloper, they
seemed loyal subjects of the new Shah. Prince Esmail began by
reminiscing about his life at his cousin’s court as a boy, and ended
by instructing me in the protocol. There was a rich piquancy in
the spectacle of a Kadjar prince instructing an American reporter
how to back out gracefully from the self-made Shah’s presence.
Over an ornate French mantelpiece, brought from his celebrated
European trip by Prince Esmail’s grandfather, the Shah Nasr ed
Din who reigned for forty-eight years, hung a portrait of that
ruler. Perhaps “grandpa,” as the prince called him, did not mind
that lesson in homage to his upstart successor, but it seemed to
me that his enormous mustaches bristled angrily.

When I arrived at the palace in a gorgeous car with the words
“for hire” on its hood in immense red lettering, I brought with
me the court photographer, who turned out to be a pretty Ru-

Persian entr’acte 537

manian Jewess. But His Majesty turned thumbs down on the plan
to photograph the interview. The best I could get was a picture of
the correspondent in the royal gardens, flanked by the Court
Master of Ceremonies and the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

That Master of Ceremonies, Amir-Nezam, led me up a marble
stairway and suddenly he was genuflecting in the royal presence.
Clumsily I followed suit. I was still trying to remember the next
step in the protocol when the King of Kings was upon me, smil-
ing pleasantly and extending the royal palm for a firm handshake.
Then he pulled over a chair toward the fireplace and motioned
for me to sit down. Sitting in the imperial presence was nowhere
in the protocol. I could see that H. H. Foroughi, who was already
in the chamber to act as interpreter, was horrified by the infor-
mality of the proceedings. When the Shah asked him, too, to be
seated the Minister complied reluctantly 5 he sat on the edge of
the chair and, never, I am sure, quite touched it.

The Shah is tall and broad-shouldered, quite unlike most Per-
sians in this respect. He seemed a rough-hewn, simple man, cut
out by nature for action rather than words ; he sounded decisive
rather than eloquent. He wore a sort of Russian blouse, khaki-
colored, and belted in the Russian manner, and his full-length
trousers ended incongruously over bedroom slippers. Like all Mos-
lems, he wore a hat — the inverted dishpan head-gear prescribed
for all Persians. The only decorative touches were two tiny gold
crowns in silhouette on his shoulders and the silver tassel on the
short string of amber beads in his strong hands.

The questions and answers arranged in advance were disposed
of in a few minutes. His Majesty reiterated his claims in the
Anglo-Persian dispute, indicated his anxiety for a peaceable settle-
ment, and took occasion to transmit a warm message of friendship
to the American people. These chores done with, I discovered
that the King of Kings was more than willing to protract the
visit. To the surprise of his Foreign Minister, his guest, and pos-
sibly himself, the interview continued on an easy informal basis
for nearly fifty minutes, where five minutes had been scheduled.
Unprepared for this generosity, I asked questions at random,
many of them so impertinent that I would scarcely have included
them in a prepared catechism. I alluded, for instance, to His
Majesty’s humble origin. His rise from a Cossack trooper under

538 DISILLUSIONMENT

Russian officers to the throne of Cyrus and Xerxes, I said, had
touched the imagination of the world and his personality had
evoked the greatest curiosity.

“To what elements in your own character,” I asked, “do you
attribute your amazing achievement?”

He thought for many seconds and said earnestly:

“It is not easy to answer. But if I were to summarize my own
explanation I would say this : I am a soldier, just a simple soldier,
and I love my task.”

Before leaving I apologized for the frankness of my interro-
gation. “I’m no diplomat, but a reporter,” I said. The Shah
laughed. “I, too, am no diplomat,” he assured me.

Not until I was out in the sunshine again did I remember that
I had completely forgotten to back out!

The news of the interview, a one-day curiosity for the world
press, was a sensation in Teheran itself. The pleased astonishment
of Mr. Hart was my best reward. By a freak of luck, I was now
the first man to have interviewed two Eastern monarchs, Stalin and
Shah Riza Pahlevi. Two men born only a few hundred miles
apart and within less than a decade of one another, one the son
of a cobbler and the other the son of poor farming folks, they
became absolute rulers of their respective nations. One is called
King of Kings and sits on the Peacock Throne; the other veils
his majesty under the title of Comrade. One exercises his control
with the can did despotism of a Genghis Khan, the other surrounds
it with the hocus-pocus of a proletarian dictatorship. But these
differences are externals. In essentials — the vastness of their power,
the quality of the adulation with which they are inundated, their
rise to the heights on waves of revolutionary sentiment — the two
men are remarkably alike. Even in their manner of speech and
their restrained simplicity, I thought, they resembled one another.
And both of them are, under different political slogans, instru-
ments of the historical impulse which is spreading Western in-
dustry Eastward.

I filed my interview and set off for home: across the Elburz
peak, from Enzeli.by boat to Baku, and back to Moscow. It
makes a great deal of difference whether one enters Russia from
Europe or from the Near East. Coming from Persia, there is no
shock of novelty— Russia seems a natural and easy transition stage

PERSIAN entr’acte 539

toward Europe. After the authentic East, with its rags and smells,
its beggars and swarming poverty, the Russian equivalents seem
natural. Moscow, so exotically un-European after Berlin and War-
saw, seemed European enough after Teheran. And it took a
journey into Asia to make me realize how completely I had ad-
justed myself to Moscow. I had the feeling of a homecoming,
more poignantly than on my return to New York two years before.

XII. Upon Sodom and Gomorrah Brimstone
and Fire

THE Soviet land presented a tragic picture at the beginning of
1933. The Five Year Plan was ended. Instead of an ampler exist-
ence along socialist lines it had brought undernourishment border-
ing on hunger 5 a scheme for fixed residences amounting to resto-
ration of feudal disciplines 5 laws prescribing death for theft 5 de-
struction of the last semblance of popular control of working
conditions; deepening discontents in the communist ranks; fascist
reactions in the outside world; lop-sided and chaotic development
of the planned economy. The national supply of livestock had
dropped 50 to 60% below 1928. Grain exports, resumed in 1930
and large enough in 1931 to alarm the international markets, had
ceased abruptly. The political police had become the largest single
employer of labor, and inquisitional methods were being used to
scrape up gold still in the possession of the citizenry.

But of all the misfortunes that afflicted the country the most
disastrous for the common people was the circumstance that the
last months of 1932 coincided with the end of the Piatiletka . The
hopes and enthusiasms blown up at home and abroad with the
bellows of propaganda made face-saving the most compelling
motive in shaping the Kremlin’s policies. Candor and compromise
might have been considered at any other time. They could not
be made to jibe with the paramount political need of this juncture,
which was to claim a “successful” completion of the Plan with a
straight face.

No sacrifice in life or suffering seemed exorbitant for the main-
tenance of appearances. The prestige of the ruling oligarchy was
at stake. An inviolable Party line, an infallible leader, an omniscient
Central Committee, can be maintained only on a diet of bigger
and better “successes.” Where none of the power is shared with
the populace, none of the responsibility can be shared either. The

540

BRIMSTONE AND FIRE

541

consequences of brute force must be covered with more brute force.
As Pravda kept repeating, this was no time for “weak nerves.”

Food difficulties in southern Russia were fast reaching famine
proportions. Admission of this fact would have made celebration
of the completion of the Five Year Plan impossible. Ruthlessness
in killing doses was therefore prescribed for the Ukraine and
Northern Caucasus, an area with some forty million inhabitants, the
area of “100% collectivization.” It would be futile to argue
whether these millions were themselves to blame for their fate.
The mentality which presumes to judge and punish forty million
human beings operates in a dimension beyond mortal logic —
in the mystic clouds of a mad god of vengeance. For all the sophis-
tries of wishful thinking “friends” of the U.S.S.R. and cynical
apologists, forty million people can never be either “innocent” or
“guilty” but rather the creatures of forces beyond their control.

No one at this time advanced the theory of guilty millions re-
sponsible for their own impending doom. That was a post-mortem
theory, a cynical coroner’s verdict of mass suicide brought forward
by the Webbs and others much later, when the famine was over
and the debris of corpses removed. At the moment common sense
on a mortal level could not compass the possibility of Jehovah-
like vengeance against regions as large as half a dozen European
countries put together. The New York Times* correspondent
cabled that if conditions did not improve, the Soviet leaders still
had an alternative:

They can either import food and other needed commodities from
abroad either on credit, where they can get it, or by using a part of
the gold reserve. Or they can follow Lenin’s example and back-pedal
in favor of private enterprise.

* By an ironic accident of personalities, the conservative New York Times had
become (in defiance of all Marxist laws of economic determinism) the mouth-
piece of the Kremlin abroad. Its Moscow correspondent in November, however,
was obliged to devote a series of articles to the food shortage. With an optimism
sadly contradicted by events in the next eight months, he declared that “it is a
mistake to exaggerate the gravity of the situation; the Russians have tightened
their belts before to a far greater extent than is likely to be needed this winter.”
Soon enough he was forced to swallow these words with an estimate of at least
two million dead through “malnutrition,” though later he tried crudely to deny
his own estimate. In any case, the Times was alone in its optimism, and in-
ordinately wrong.

542 DISILLUSIONMENT

Like the Times , I assumed that the government would import
food. The markets of the world at the moment were glutted with
grain. A few million dollars would have bought enough bread
in Canada and elsewhere to head off the famine. A very minor
diversion of money from machines to food would have saved
millions of lives.

But the Kremlin was not thinking on the level of common sense.
Ordinary logic could not follow the reasoning in the rarefied
reaches of its delusions. It neither imported food nor permitted an
appeal to the world’s charitable instincts as Lenin had done in an-
other famine emergency, nor back-pedaled in favor of private en-
terprise. It merely took extreme measures to conceal the disaster
from the world and thus save face for the fabled Plan. The de-
cision made Stalin and his underlings as directly responsible for
every death from typhus, every bloated baby stomach, every
wagonload of corpses in the following months as if they had stran-
gled the victims with their own hands.

My lingering scruples against speaking out about Soviet reali-
ties were badly shaken up by the impact of this supreme cruelty.
It was increasingly difficult to make high-minded excuses for silence
and formulas of evasion. Inertia, procrastination, a conscious anxiety
to hold on to my job a little longer— the same forces which were
silencing many of my colleagues — provide the essential explana-
tion. I wrote just enough of the facts to placate my conscience—
and to infuriate my official hosts — but not enough to break the
conspiracy of silence that now enshrouded the Soviet Union.

Inwardly I was deeply ashamed of the goose-stepping into which
the press corps had been maneuvered, and I know that other
correspondents shared that shame. We talked of little else than
the hunger and the terror about which we did not write or wrote
in misty circumlocutions. Looking back upon that period I find
it impossible to make honest apologies for myself or for them,
except the pseudo-Marxist apology of economic determinism. I
can only make amends, as a few others are doing.

Against this background of muted despair, the celebration of the
official opening of Dnieprostroi, in the heart of the district soon
to be devastated by man-made famine, had an edge of the gro-
tesque. Several carloads of foreigners and high government offi-
cials went in a special train from Moscow to the new hydroelec-

BRIMSTONE AND FIRE 543

trie station. Practically all the resident foreign correspondents, and
a batch arrived on special assignment, were in our party. Malcolm
Muggeridge of the Manchester Guardian has, in his book Winter
in Moscow , an unforgettable chapter on that journey; though
done as broad caricature that chapter conveys the essential truth
(which is the function of good caricature) : the insanity of a junket
to hungerland, the correspondents chaperoned by official halle-
lujah-shouters, to dedicate a mechanical mammoth among wheat-
fields abandoned to weeds; of a holiday to glorify an electric sta-
tion built in large part with coerced labor and producing electric
power for factories not yet in existence.

Muggeridge himself was among the most gullible on this jour-
ney, having only just arrived from London, with all the precon-
ceptions about Russia fostered by the paper he represented and
other well-meaning liberal publications. I remember how he and
another young Londoner defended their dream against the doubts
and cynicisms of the more seasoned correspondents. The other Eng-
lishman died in Moscow in a tramcar accident with his illusions
intact. Muggeridge lived to record his disillusionment; much of
the bitterness of his brilliant book is clearly a revenge against
his own imported certainties.

The graceful curve of the Dnieper dam, the tamed jungle of
masts and wiring, the giant dynamos provided a luscious feast for
a modern photographer like the personable Margaret Bourke-
White. Whether in the Ukraine or Muscle Shoals, machinery is
impressive and lends itself naturally to the rhetoric of camera and
typewriter. Neither the striking photographs of Miss Bourke-
White nor the striking statistics in our dispatches touched the core
of the curious rite of machine-worship in a stricken land.

On the evening of our arrival we were moved to ecstasy by the
beauty of this great station looming against the star-studded skies.
The next morning was chill, overcast and gloomy, but a residue
of that ecstasy remained with us. The mass of people in the
grandstand, however, had been on the scene too long to be thrilled
by the strident poetry of machines. Meekly they applauded the
speeches; but there was no warmth of conviction in them. Kalinin
and Ordzhonikidze and a dozen others made dully repetitious
speeches; a number of Russians and Americans were awarded be-
ribboned badges; and the holiday was dispersed.

Immense signs proclaimed that soviet power plus electricity

DISILLUSIONMENT

544

equals socialism, and no one asked aloud whose power? what
kind of socialism? There was grim fitness in the fact that the most
publicized object in the whole Plan, completed punctually in the
final months of the Plan, should be located in the region which
was paying the most gruesome price for the whole undertaking.

Nor was it accidental that a renewed purge of the Party ranks
should be ordered almost at the same moment that Dnieprostroi
was declared opened. The drive for orthodoxy was but another
symptom of the mounting difficulties; heresy hunting always
thrives in moments of crisis. The Kremlin aimed for absolute
conformity of minds.

As many as a million communists, it was announced, must be
expelled. Since the Party numbered about three millions, every
member felt that he faced a one-to-two chance of expulsion. No
matter how cautious and tight-mouthed he had been, he might
be denounced as a heretic, stripped of his membership card, his
job, his Soviet respectability. For tens of thousands it would mean
beginning again at the bottom of the ladder in that climb to pre-
ferred positions to which they devoted their lives. Through the
disgrace of one man many others might be dragged into outer
darkness: relatives, intimate friends, those who owed their politi-
cal preferment to his influence.

The purge set for January first — to continue throughout the
new year — thus spread a panic of fear, not only among the Party
members but in widening circles to millions of others. The cleans-
ing, in the final analysis, is a device for disciplining the Party, for
weeding out those of incomplete faith. The time for the purge
was shrewdly chosen. At this moment when the cumulative mis-
takes of the Stalin leadership were providing a harvest of hunger
and discontent, it was a warning to communists that the whip was
poised over their backs.

In the symphony of fears the purge was a strong motif .

2

In a play then popular in Moscow, Alexander Afinogenyev’s
Fear y an Old Bolshevik woman, Klara Spasova, recalls the horrors
of Russia’s past. “Entire villages of rebellious serfs were whipped,”
she exclaims.

BRIMSTONE AND FIRE 545

In January, 1933, the rulers of Russia’s present, too, whipped
rebellious villages. They packed all the inhabitants of three Cos-
sack towns in the Kuban, North Caucasus, into cattle cars and
shipped them to the Arctic forests. All men, women, and children,
innocent and guilty alike, young and old, sick and sound, were
torn up by their roots and dumped in the wilderness.

Their fate was to serve as an object lesson to the rest of the
Kuban.

Reading of it, I recalled that when the Lord’s wrath was about
to be loosed from the heavens upon Sodom and Gomorrah, the
patriarch Abraham pleaded with Jehovah, saying, “Wilt thou con-
sume the righteous with the wicked?” Finding the God of Wrath
amenable to reason, Abraham did a little Oriental haggling. Would
Jehovah spare the cities if they harbored fifty of the righteous,
or even fifty-less-five, finally bargaining down to ten. And Jehovah
said, “I will not destroy it for the ten’s sake.” Even when
“ Jehovah rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire
from Jehovah out of heaven,” He spared Lot.

There was no Abraham to plead and bargain for the Kuban
towns: he would instantly have been convicted of “rotten liberal-
ism” and “petty bourgeois idealism” and forced to share the doom
of the Cossack sinners. The Bolshevik gods of wrath in the North
Caucasus, moreover, had none of Jehovah’s Trotskyist strain. On
the contrary, they boasted in the Rostov and other local news-
papers that no one, not a solitary Lot, was spared, and the righte-
ous were indeed consumed with the guilty as a warning to other
districts which loved not collectivization. They boasted of it in
eight-column headlines, and told how Red Army veterans would
be quartered upon the land and in the houses from which the
owners had been driven.

By chance I saw those newspapers. A European journalist under
instructions to “play ball” with the Soviet leaders and therefore
unable to send the story himself, turned the papers over to me.
For five years, the Press Department had insisted that anything
published in the Soviet press was by that fact alone exempt from
censorship. I therefore wrote the story and submitted it to Com-
rade Umansky. He was exceedingly distressed that the Kuban
atrocity should have reached the ears of a foreign correspondent.
Yet he could not see his way clear to forbidding the cable; I had

546 DISILLUSIONMENT

the Rostov clippings with me. For many minutes he scratched his
long hair and gritted his golden teeth — and suddenly he saw a
way out.

“But, Mr. Lyons,” he smiled, “you say that 40,000 are in-
volved in this mass deportation. Where do you get the figure?”

“That’s simple. I looked up your latest official census. The
population of the three stamtzas [settlements] as given there
totals about 40,000. In fact, my dispatch cites the official source for
the figure.”

“All the same, Pm sorry, I can’t let you use that figure. That
was the population two or three years ago. How do you know
what it is today?”

“All right — you tell me how many were deported! Surely
someone in your government knows.”

“No, your cable can’t go unless you eliminate the figure. Just
say that the inhabitants were exiled, without specifying how many.”

I was willing to compromise for fifteen or twenty thousand
to get it by, but refused to send the story without some approximate
fig Ure — which was precisely what the censor wanted to accomplish.
There was the glint of victory in the golden fangs.

A few days later I was in Berlin, on the vacation trip that
I had postponed for the Persian assignment. I discussed the cen-
sored story with Fred Kuh, head of our Berlin Bureau, and he
agreed that it was too important a piece of news to be suppressed.
He filed it for me from Berlin. The world was horrified by the
story. More than the generalized talk of peasant troubles, this
concrete instance of many thousands of human beings exiled en
masse , without regard to individual guilt or innocence, dramatized
the Soviet agrarian tragedy.

Questioned by their editors, all Moscow correspondents were
obliged to corroborate my facts, though there were different
guesses as to the number affected. My own editors showered me
with congratulatory messages on the “clean scoop.” Two Moscow
colleagues, Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune and
Bill Stoneman of the Chicago Daily News, were emboldened by
the interest stirred up by my Kuban scoop to make a surreptitious
journey into Ukraine and North Caucasus. They were picked up
by the G.P.U. and ordered back to Moscow, but not before they
had been surfeited with horror in close-up- Barnes’ account of the

BRIMSTONE AND FIRE

547

trip began, with ominous words about “hunger and terror stalking
southern Russia.” Correspondents being an imitative clan, others
were led to write more daringly of the facts we all knew.

My Kuban story, it thus transpired, started the first serious
breach in the conspiracy of silence around the famine. The Soviet
authorities, I had reason to learn, never forgave me.

At the same time, a series of mail stories that I had written in
Moscow began publication all over the world. In these I sum-
marized the cumulative increase of official pressures amounting
together to a new reign of terror. I referred to the passport sys-
tem; the recent death decrees; the new “Political Departments”
— in effect, G.P.U. detachments — established throughout agrarian
districts with unabridged authority over the peasant millions; the
renewed drive against non-conformists in the Communist Party.

None of this was news. We had all cabled these things in brief,
isolated dispatches. Drawn together in one series of articles, how-
ever, they could not be so easily lost upon the outside world.
Any one of these things might be explained away; taken to-
gether they revealed a state of crisis at the end of the Five Year
Plan. The sin of my Kuban dispatch was thus made a hundred-
fold more culpable. Several of the German newspaper clients of
the United Press were featuring the series, and word was conveyed
to me that the Soviet Embassy in Berlin was boiling over with
indignation.

3

I was still in Berlin on January 30, the day Adolf Hitler as-
sumed power. Several of us were loitering at the Adlon bar,
rolling poker dice with toothpicks for chips, when one of the
players was summoned to the telephone. He emerged from the
booth in great excitement. “Hitler’s just been made Reichskanzler,”
he threw over his shoulder as he rushed to his office. A little later
four or five of the American correspondents foregathered for
lunch. Their talk seethed with fateful questions.

The “impossible,” the ludicrous had come to pass — the half-
hysterical Austrian, the fantastic oyer a bowffe Napoleon, was actu-
ally at the head of Germany’s government. Did that mean full-
blown fascism? Did it presage a personal dictatorship? Was it
merely another brief episode in the country’s travail? Despite the

DISILLUSIONMENT

548

millions o£ votes accumulated by his mongrel National Socialism
(the very name a political hybrid of incompatibles), seasoned re-
porters had refused to believe that he would succeed in strangling
the Republic. Even on this day of his triumph, in fact, I still
heard correspondents of international repute scoff at the notion
of a Nazi dictatorship. Was not the democratic machinery still in
force? they asked. Were there not von Papen and von Hinden-
burg as brakes on Nazi ambitions?

They moderated their skepticism long before midnight. That
evening they watched Hitler and Hindenburg reviewing the Nazi
victory parade. The aged President seemed a pathetic super-
numerary in that show, as uniformed Nazi battalions by the hun-
dred thousand marched past the balcony on the Wilhelmstrasse
yelling “Heil Hitler!” The genie released from the bottle could
never be stuffed back again. Thereafter events moved with the
swiftness of catastrophe — -the providential fire, the suppression of
all civil liberties, and the abdication of the Reichstag in favor of the
brown-shirt dictatorship; lawlessness enthroned and sadistic orgy
haloed by nationalist and racial phobias.

Less than five months earlier, the Comintern, in a resolution
on the international situation, had hailed its phantom “successes”
everywhere, including Germany. Solemnly it had attested the
imminence of proletarian revolution in Spain and Poland — and
Germany ! The machiavellism inspired by the Kremlin had begun
by duping others and ended by duping itself. In Germany, as
elsewhere in the world, it had erected a 'papier-mache “move-
ment” of sonorous names for make-believe organizations: the
“united front from below.” Moscow wanted its foreign creatures
uselessly occupied with noisy toys, with Red-This and Proletarian-
That, so that it might build socialism in one country without the
additional bother and responsibility of revolutionary movements
abroad. A hollow intransigence made the most noise and involved
the least likelihood of practical action. All communists of any but
the exact brand sanctioned by Moscow were therefore “renegades”
and “the chief danger of the present period.” All labor leaders
and socialists were “social fascists” and therefore worse than the
unsocial fascists of the Hitler stripe.

While the Nazi movement was rolling up strength, Moscow’s
policies continued to splinter the labor and liberal opposition.

BRIMSTONE AND FIRE 549

German communists who recognized the danger and begged for
a strategy dictated by German realities rather than Russian sec-
tarianism were expelled and pilloried as enemies of the pro-
letariat. Instead of rallying to the defense of the Republic, the
official communists, their emissaries shuttling between Moscow
and Berlin, joined the Nazi attack on democracy, had actually
voted with the Hitlerites in Prussia, and used their chief strength
against the Social-Democrats and more conservative labor groups.

The exact measure of Moscow’s responsibility for the German
tragedy will be argued for generations and will never be settled.
Only two things seem to me too clear to be doubted — and infinitely
important in judging communist effort in other countries:

First: At every point in Germany’s history in the years pre-
ceding Hitler’s victory, communist policy and tactics were de-
cided in Moscow, with the specific interests of Soviet Russia, rather
than the interests of Germany or the larger interests of the inter-
national labor movement, in mind. The rationalization of this state
of affairs is clear enough: Russia is the world revolution and its
practical needs must take precedence. But the rationalization is
mendacious sleight-of-mind. As long as the Communist Inter-
national is little more than another name for Russia’s political
power, as long as the Russian tail wags the international dog, the
sacrifice of the proletariat in one country or two dozen countries
will seem small enough price for some immediate political advan-
tage to the Soviet regime. The International is simply a helpless
instrument of Soviet statecraft, a “stooge” for the Kremlin.

Second: The Communist propaganda against democracy far se
as a bourgeois deception, its cavalier attitude toward civil rights,
its ridicule of humanistic squeamishness over mass slaughter and
organized brutality, all played directly into the hands of the
Hitler legions. By its very need to defend Schrecklichkeit in
Stalin’s domain, the official Communist Party provided the justifi-
cation for Schrecklichkeit in Hitler’s domain.

By implication the Comintern subsequently admitted at least
the second of these facts. Too late — and glorying as always in the
superior wisdom of its lateness — it began in the next few years to
recognize virtues in the capitalist brand of democracy. Too late —
and swinging characteristically to the opposite extreme — it dis-
covered the need for a united front from above, as far above as pos-

5^0 DISILLUSIONMENT

sible, with practically anybody willing to unite except Trotskyists
and other non-conformist communists. Russia itself, until then
proudly contemptuous of democracy, was scared by the German
debacle into a panicky revision of its views on government (not,
alas, its behavior!) to make them more acceptable to democratic
nations. None of this post-factum wisdom, however, could, undo
the evil in Germany or slacken the momentum of the fascist ad-
vance.

Despite three years of world depression, unemployment and
capitalist despairs, communism internationally had made no head-
way. Instead, Germany was in the grip of Hitler, and fascist
tendencies were dominant in half a dozen other European coun-
tries. Moscow’s dictatorship over the revolutionary movement, of
the world had shown itself a pathetic failure. More communists
were outside the Comintern fold than inside. Whatever strength
the movement had was hopelessly splintered.

The Soviet consulate in Berlin, for the second time in my ex-
perience, held up my visa for Moscow. Having left my passport
as usual, I returned for it in a few hours, which in the past had
sufficed. A minor functionary spoke out of turn. “Visa for Lyons?”
he said; “oh, but that is not yet decided. It is being discussed at
this very moment inside there.” When I called the following after-
noon I was ushered into the office of one of the Embassy secre-
taries.

On his desk lay a stack of clippings of my articles. He fingered
them, shook his head sadly, shrugged his shoulders.

“Ah, such things,” he sighed, “such things are very bad, es-
pedally now. They help the Hitler cause.”

“Precisely,” I agreed. “That’s one reason why I object to such
things. The sooner Moscow quits them the better for everybody,
especially correspondents.”

The “things” to which he referred, however, were my articles
rather than the Soviet facts they embodied. Apparently the Stalin
regime had every right to “rain upon Sodom and Gomorrah
brimstone and fire from Jehovah out of heaven,” consuming “the
righteous with the wicked;” it could slaughter its peasants and
imprison its heretics. The Kremlin was blameless. But a corre-
spondent who reported such triumphs of monolithic madness was

BRIMSTONE AND FIRE

551

grievously at fault. The secretary could not see that Stalin’s crime
in deporting the Kuban peasants was at least as serious as mine
in recording the fact. Or, who knows? Perhaps he did see it.
I have never envied Soviet spokesmen at home or abroad their
unsavory job.

The mild reprimand having been administered, my visa was
duly issued. In Moscow the second installment of the reprimand
awaited me. Comrade Umansky took a friendly-sarcastic tack,
one of his most practiced roles. Apparently I had been mischievous
. . . correspondents will be correspondents . . . and he, for one,
would like to guard me against the wrath of his government.

“But what can I do?” he asked, pursing his lips in a cherubic
expression of impotent philanthropy. “You have placed the Press
Department in a position where we cannot intervene in your be-
half if certain other branches of the government decide to take
action against you.”

“What action? Are you hinting at expulsion for that story
of the deported Kuban stanitsas

“I cannot tell what they might do.”

“Well, I’m prepared to take my medicine. Nobody questions
the truth of the story. You have confirmed it yourself. After all,
I didn’t deport them — you did.”

I transmitted the gist of this conversation to the United Press
in New York. I told them that an order for my expulsion for
the story that elicited the congratulatory cables was not out of
the question. Wlien the order finally did not come, I was sur-
prised. My sojourn in the land of the Five Year Plan, however,
was from this time forward on sufferance only. I had broken a
taboo by giving the outside world a peep into the official closets
where skeletons were stored. The miracle is that I survived nine
months longer.

XIII. Did the First Five Year Plan Succeed?

MOUNTAINS of statistics have been piled up, sorted and re-
sorted, tunneled and dynamited in attempts to ascertain whether
the Five Year Plan “succeeded.” There is no amateur economist
so humble that he has not ventured an analysis. Under the com-
pulsion of my trade, I have myself dabbled in billions and tried
to unscramble the many different monetary measures — pre-war
rubles, 1926 rubles, “rubles of respective years,” etc. I have won-
dered what to do with clean-cut statistical triumphs which some-
how showed up in frightful disaster all around me. I have puz-
zled over mysterious hiatuses in the official figures and low-
quality correctives and sectors of the original Plan which were
sunk and forgotten in transit.

In my heart of hearts, I have always felt the futility and the
ghoulish cynicism of reducing these years of travail to arith-
metic. Fine mathematical successes in agriculture had no place for
the famine cadavers, liquidations, death edicts, the conquest and
pacification of a hundred million peasants. Try as I would to mar-
shal figures, I could not be thrilled by furnaces and electric sta-
tions fer se y without reference to the human beings who built
them and worked in them. The forms of political and economic
power, the happiness and dignity of the myriads of men, women
and children, outweighed for me those mountains of statistics.

Was the first Five Year Plan a “success”? For whom and for
what? Certainly not for the socialist dream, which had been emptied
of human meaning in the process, reduced to a mechanical for-
mula of the state as a super-trust and the population as its help-
less serfs. Certainly not for the individual worker, whose trade
union had been absorbed by the state-employer, who was terrorized
by medieval decrees, who had lost even the illusion of a share
in regulating his own life. Certainly not for the revolutionary
movement of the world, which was splintered, harassed by the
growing strength of fascism, weaker and less hopeful than at

DID THE FIRST FIVE YEAR PLAN SUCCEED? 553

the launching of the Plan. Certainly not for the human spirit,
mired and outraged by sadistic cruelties on a scale new in modern
history, shamed by meekness and sycophancy and systematized
hypocrisy.

If industrialization were an end in itself, unrelated to larger
human ends, the U.S.S.R. had an astounding amount of physical
property to show for its sacrifices. Chimneys had begun to domi-
nate horizons once notable for their church domes. Scores of mam-
moth new enterprises were erected. A quarter of a million prisoners
— a larger number of slaves than the Pharaohs mobilized to build
their pyramids, than Peter the Great mobilized to build his new
capital — hacked a canal between the White and the Baltic Seas;
a hundred thousand survivors of this “success” were digging an-
other canal just outside Moscow as the second Plan got under
way. The country possessed 32 blast furnaces and 63 open hearth
furnaces that had not existed in 1928, a network of power stations
with a capacity four times greater than pre-war Russia had, twice
as many oil pipe lines as in 1928. Hundreds of machines and
tools formerly imported or unknown in Russia were being manu-
factured at home and large sections of mining were mechanized
for the first time. The foundations were laid for a new industrial
empire in the Urals and eastern Siberia, the impregnable heart
of the country. Two-thirds of the peasantry and four-fifths of the
plowed land were “socialized” — that is, owned and managed by
the state-employer as it owned and managed factories and work-
ers. The defensive ability of the country, in a military sense, had
been vastly increased, with new mechanical bases for its war in-
dustries.

Measured merely for bulk, the Plan achieved much, though
it fell far short of the original goals. On the qualitative side,
the picture is much less impressive. Here, we find reflected the
low caliber of the human material through which the Plan was
necessarily translated from paper to life. Overhead costs were
greater all along the line than expected— all construction allowed
50% for overhead, compared with 12% allowed in America. Error
and spoilage surpassed the worst fears of the Kremlin. A Con-
ference on Quality Production in 1933, for instance, disclosed
officially that spoilage in textile mills ranged between 13 and 47%.
The productivity of labor did not rise as expected, so that twice

DISILLUSIONMENT

554

as many men and women as planned had to be drawn from
leisure or agriculture to make up the difference. The costs of the
Plan, reckoned in any terms, were tragically exorbitant, more so
than even the keenest Soviet enemies had prophesied.

These costs were not merely bookkeeping tragedies. They were
paid for in hunger, terror, privation, epidemic diseases.

But let us look at the Plan in its most mechanistic aspect.

Speaking at a Party conference in January, Stalin claimed a quan-
titative fulfillment of 93-7%. The figure — close enough to 100%
for all practical purposes — remains the Kremlin’s formal estimate
of the results.

At the start of the final year, 1932, it was officially announced
that the Plan would be carried out fully if a growth of production
by 37% were achieved. In point of fact, as Molotov has stated, the
growth that year was only 8p2%. Simple arithmetic shows that
when it requires a 37% increase to finish a job, and only 8 p2%
is attained, the job is no more than 79 °fo complete. This is frima
facie evidence that Stalin’s figure of 93.7 is suspiciously optimis-
tic.

How did he reach that figure? The government’s summary
showed a gross output for “census industry” in 1932, the last year
of the Plan, of 34.3 billion rubles’ production in the values of
1926-27. The Plan allegedly called for a total of 36.6 billion
rubles in the concluding year. That is where Stalin got his per-
centage.

But the statistical method involved is open to question. Stalin’s
figure assumes that the Plan started from scratch and reached
93.7% of what it aimed to accomplish. In sober fact, the Plan
started with an output of 15.7 billion rubles in the year preced-
ing its launching. What was actually aimed at was an increase
of 20.9 billions 5 the increase achieved was 18.6 billions, so that
the margin of non-fulfillment was 11%, instead of the 6.3%
cited by Stalin.

This statistical method deserves a little consideration, since
it is typical of jugglery such as an American income-tax chiseler
might well envy. The sleight-of-mind is so deft that I followed
this method myself for years, until Zara Witkin, whose engineer-
ing mind is proof against statistical magic, pointed it out to me.

DID THE FIRST FIVE YEAR PLAN SUCCEED? 555

Throughout its figures, the Kremlin compares total results with
the planned totals, instead of comparing the actual increase with
the flannel increase. A consideration of the figures for the steel
industry, for instance, will illustrate the difference:

Steel output in 1928 was 4.2 million tons. The Plan foresaw
an increase of 6.1 millions, for a total of 10.3 millions. Actual
production in the final year was 5.9 millions. This meant an in-
crease of 1.7 millions over 1928, or 28% of the increase planned.
The Kremlin, however, says: “We aimed at 10.3 and got 5.9,
therefore our plan was fulfilled by 57%*” On that basis, if pro-
duction had not increased a single ton, if it had remained at 4.2
millions, the plan would have been carried out by 42% — extraor-
dinary statistical progress while standing still and marking time!.

When this cute piece of arithmetical legerdemain is “liquidated,"
many of the Kremlin’s proudest boasts are strangely deflated.
Steel output instead of increasing by 57% — in itself a sad failure
considering the staggering investments — shows up as only 28%.
New housing, with an official credit of 84% increase, actually in-
creased only by 44% (the need for new housing, at the same time,
grew by several hundred percent because of the increase of urban
workers). The mileage of railroads in operation, instead of reach-
ing 89% of the plan as claimed, showed an increase of only
44%. Petroleum production, manufacture of steam turbines and
a very few other items actually exceeded the quantitative totals
of increase called for by the Plan. The margins of failure in im-
portant branches of national economy may be judged from the
following percentages of increase compared with the 100%
planned: tractors, 28% 5 automobiles, 13% 3 brick, 28% j cement,
37% j lumber, 40 %$ electrification, 77 %.

2

It is not without interest that the official Soviet summary of
the fulfillment gives no production figures for such important
industries as non-ferrous metals (copper, zinc, lead, aluminum),
although tremendous amounts of capital had been poured into
those industries. It omits output in the textile industry, sugar,
rubber shoes, salt and many other branches catering to the every-

556 DISILLUSIONMENT

day needs of the people. These omissions may reasonably be as-
sumed to reflect a breakdown in those sectors.

The disastrous conditions in transportation and the railway
system were not denied by the government spokesmen. But these
were the funnels through which the entire industrial program must
of necessity filter. The insistence on “success” when transportation
has all but collapsed is, to say the least, extraordinary. By a little
judicious juggling the impression is created that the very suc-
cess of the plan, in overtaxing the transport facilities, was to blame.
One of the major failures is thus revamped into a counterfeit
proof of success. The fact, however, is that transportation was
not only badly planned, but even those defective plans were not
carried out. The Piatiletka called for the completion of 17,000
kilometers of new railway. Only 6,500 kilometers were accom-
plished. In the ten preceding years, 1918-28, despite civil war and
without the bloodshed and ballyhoo of the Five Year Plan, there
had been completed 18,500 kilometers, or nearly three times as
much as during the Plan.

The failure in steel, cement, lumber and brick is particularly
significant. Certainly new construction, the essential factor in the
whole Plan, could not go beyond the construction materials avail-
able. Stalin’s claim of 93.7% fulfillment is illogical and patently
“doctored” when the increase in construction materials needed
for that fulfillment ranges between 28 and 40%.

The doctoring evidently can be traced to the confusion in ruble
values on which Stalin’s figure rests. The official publication of the
Five Year Plan gave 1928 production in census industry (to which
alone Stalin has reference) as 8.1 billion f re-war rubles. The
equivalent in 1926 rubles is given as 15.7 billions. The government
thus recognized the 1926 rubles as about one-half the value of the
pre-war ruble. The same published Plan gave the planned pro-
duction for the final year as 21 billion fr e-war rubles. On the
same ratio this would be about 42 billions in 1926-27 rubles.
Strangely enough, however, the planned production is set down
arbitrarily as 36.6 billions in 1926 values, or some five billions
less than it should be according to the government’s own valua-
tions.

Reducing the whole business to fre-war rubles, in which we
are merely following the method of the original Plan, the actual

DID THE FIRST FIVE YEAR PLAN SUCCEED? 557

increase of 1 8.6 billions in 1926-27 rubles cited by Stalin amounts
to 9.3 billions in pre-war rubles. This means only 72% of the
scheduled growth — a far throw from the 93.7% claimed by Stalin.

Even that figure is vastly inflated, since it takes no cognizance
of quality factors, increased cost per unit, inadequate production
per man. My personal estimate — and I make no pretensions as an
economist— is that the Five Year Plan, in terms of production, was
only half fulfilled.

Colleagues more qualified to judge statistical mysteries regard
that as a conservative estimate. In any event, it is a more respon-
sible figure than Stalin’s in relation to the official statistics for
available construction materials. It is also more nearly in logical re-
lation to the power resources in actual use. The Plan called for
an increase of power by 3.5 million kw. capacity 5 the actual in-
crease was only 2.7 million kw. or 77% ; while there are no
reliable statistics as to what portion of this new power capacity was
utilized, no competent observer claims that more than three-quar-
ters of it was in use 3 three-quarters of 77%, the most optimistic
reckoning, gives a 58% increase in power — much more nearly
in line with a claim of half fulfillment than with Stalin’s claim
of almost complete fulfillment.

In agriculture — and there is a nauseating cold-bloodedness about
measuring the agrarian tragedy statistically — we have the Krem-
lin’s own figure of 699 million centners of grain in 1932, the last
year of the Plan. This compares with 801 million centners in
1913 and 733 in 1928. The area under grain increased, but the
unit output fell (1913 — 8.4 centners per hectare; 1932 — 7 cent-
ners per hectare; a decline of about 20%), despite the abolition
of the strip system, the staggering cash investments, the immense
accretion of farm machinery and the sacrifice of millions of human
lives. The tragic failure in the domain of livestock — which can be
translated as food, leather, draught power, etc. — was too evident
to be denied or juggled arithmetically.

Agriculture, standards of living, housing facilities were as much
a part of the Five Year Plan as production in census industry
to which Stalin limits himself. When these are considered as part
of the whole set-up, when the costs in life and suffering and politi-
cal terror are added, the Plan must be regarded as one of the most
startling failures in all human history. One searches the records

558 disillusionment

of mankind in vain for a more miserable return on a vast invest-
ment.

That the Plan has been accepted even by hostile capitalist
economists as on the whole “successful” shows the gullibility and
naivete of those who deal in cold figures instead of living realities.
Parrotwise the world has repeated rhetorical exaggerations about
“decades -of industrial progress crowded into a few years” I
shudder to think how much such loose rhetoric I have floated my-
self!

The second Piatiletka was sketched in broad strokes at the same
time that the claim of “success” was advanced for the first one.
The details were not to be filled in for more than a year; the
building was more than a fifth erected before the architects finished
the designs. The rough sketch, however, showed clearly enough
that there would be no let-up in the killing tempos. Still panting
and out of breath from the harrowing effort of the first plan,
the Russian people were confronted, early in 1 933? with a second
and no less strenuous one. The loud official enthusiasm awoke no
echoes in the breasts of the masses. They were too intimately aware
of the obstacles and sacrifices to be thrilled by the road ahead.
But by this time the popular reaction counted for less than ever
before: there were harsh decrees, passports, a new concept of fac-
tory management, the revivified profit motive to take the place
of enthusiasm.

Viewed in sufficient perspective, so that the human factor fades
out, the launching of the new plan occurred under propitious
circumstances. The high pageant of Soviet economic and social
daring was dramatically set off by the world-wide economic crisis.
The foreign press and bourgeois economists were too completely
demoralized by the ghastly shambles of their own economic scene
to be critical of Soviet claims. Soviet leaders were not behindhand
in bringing the contrasts home to the humblest of their wards and
the most distant of their deaf villages. In the domain of mass
propaganda, in forging simple slogans, they have no peers any-
where. Every newspaper and billboard and factory bulletin in
the land carried a schematized reminder of capitalist troubles:
Over There and Over Here , with the items listed selected arbi-
trarily and with small regard for completeness. This international

DID THE FIRST FIVE YEAR PLAN SUCCEED? $59

scoreboard was etched on the consciousness of the Soviet popula-
tion with all the acids of press, radio, screen and school. The Soviet
state was represented as marching forward resolutely while the
rest of the world groped through fog banks of depression. The
gods who manage such things had provided a setting for the new
plan as effective as though made to order for the Kremlin.

But at closer range the moment was not nearly so auspicious.
The world crisis itself had had strong repercussions on Moscow’s
economic plans. It undermined the foreign markets through which
Russia must pay for imported machinery, equipment, and brains.
If the second Five Year Plan must rely almost entirely on do-
mestic machinery and native brains, it was not altogether a free
choice. Despite all its international scoreboards, the U.S.S.R. was
as eager to overcome the world depression as any other nation.

Even more important, the concluding year of the first plan had
turned out the most difficult. Defects and failures are no less
cumulative than successes. Notwithstanding the barrage of alibis
(many of them true ones), the ordinary citizen judged the plan
just ended in personal terms, in meat and herrings and shoes and
personal freedoms rather than in kilowatt-hours or ton-kilometers.
His private balance of the plan was not nearly as cheerful as
Stalin’s.

The resolution on the new plan adopted by the Party con-
ference at which Stalin spoke undertook nothing less than the
actual introduction of socialism. The first plan, it asserted, had
laid the foundations for socialism — the second would erect the final
edifice:

The conference holds that the chief political task of the Second Five
Year Plan is to do away with the capitalist elements and with classes in
general; to destroy fully the causes giving rise to class distinctions and
exploitation; to abolish the survivals of capitalism in economy and in
the consciousness of the people; to transform the whole working popu-
lation of the country into conscious and active builders of a classless
society.

Having redefined socialism to mean merely state monopoly
of all branches of economy — a feudalistic serf “socialism” un-
dreamed of by socialist theorists and philosophers and agitators

DISILLUSIONMENT

560

before the Soviet era — Stalin’s conference thus attested its im-
pending triumph. In due time it would announce that the triumph
was completed.

To explain the palpable failures and hardships despite claims
of such towering achievements, Stalin resorted, as usual, to the
machinations of foreign and internal enemies. He warned that
espionage and sabotage were rife. “A strong and powerful dic-
tatorship of the proletariat,” he exclaimed, “that is what we must
have now in order to shatter the last remnants of the dying classes
and to frustrate their felonious designs.” Forgetting utterly that
the state was to have evaporated as socialism triumphed, he called
for a stronger, more ruthless, more arbitrary state even while
announcing the triumph of socialism.

The G.P.U. took up his challenge. Scapegoats were found.
Again the arrests were counted by the score and the hundred. In
March, thirty-five agrarian specialists, among them high officials
of the agricultural commissariat, were shot at one sweep. Post-
humous charges even more incredible than those against the forty-
eight similarly shot in 1930 were advanced. Perhaps there was
an element of truth in these charges, but the accused were safely
dead and could not refute them. And on the very day after this
wholesale execution which was to symbolize the difficulties in agri-
culture, half a dozen Englishmen and several dozen Russians
were arrested on similar charges in relation to industry. The sec-
ond plan, like the first, began with a demonstration trial.

XIV. Britishers on Trial

ON MARCH 12, 1933, a “free day” in the Soviet six-day week,
Linton Wells, then representing the International News Service,
came into exclusive possession of one of the biggest news stories
in many a Russian year. Lunching at the British Embassy that
day, he learned that six Englishmen, as well as a few dozen Rus-
sians, employed by the Metropolitan- Vickers Company on its proj-
ects in the U.S.S.R. had been arrested and were being kept incom-
municado. They were apparently charged with high crimes against
the Soviet state. G.P.U. agents had rounded up the Metro-Vickers
people the night before and the Embassy had not as yet been
permitted to see any of them. It was the first time since the
Shakhty affair in 1928 that a group of foreigners had been ar-
rested and was certain to stir up intense interest throughout the
world.

Linton did the most heroic thing that any newspaperman can
possibly do — risking life is a minor matter by contrast. He called
all the British and American correspondents to his apartment and
shared his information with us. We were too excited by the news
to be properly grateful. With capital charges facing six foreigners,
some of whom were his friends, Linton placed their interests above
his own professional glory. Only a reporter can appreciate the
mettle of that heroism.

We sent a test dispatch to the home of censor Mironov and
apprised him that we would be up to see him with our final stories
at a definite hour 5 this gave him time to check up on the facts.
At the appointed hour more than a dozen of us climbed the long
flights of stairs and presented our cables.

“I am sorry, gentlemen, very sorry,” Mironov smiled the smile
that brought his nose within a few centimeters of his protrud-
ing chin. “The story can’t go. This is, as you know, a free day.
We cannot obtain confirmation. As far as I’m concerned, I know
nothing about such arrests.”

561

$62 disillusionment

For the first time in all my Moscow years the entire press corps
was acting together. Even Duranty spoke up boldly ; being an
Englishman himself he could scarcely do less. This story did not
concern six million Russians, but six Britishers. The unanimity and
grimness of our protest yanked Mironov’s nose from his chin. He
did some frantic telephoning to mysterious places. Finally he
emerged with instructions to pass brief dispatches giving no more
than the bare fact of the arrest. The “united front” of Anglo-
American journalism scored a victory of a sort.

Most of us rounded out the victory by telephone. Since tele-
phone communications with Berlin and London had been opened,
the correspondents had fallen into the habit of evading the cen-
sorship occasionally. Technically we were expected to get the Press
Department’s consent before transmitting anything by telephone;
in practice the censors winked at the procedure. Several of my
colleagues, indeed, used the telephone exclusively and for all prac-
tical purposes considered the censorship liquidated.

The news of the arrests created a great sensation throughout
the world. We were pressed for additional information. The chief
of the Metro- Vickers operations in the U.S.S.R., Allan Monk-
house, was released next day. We interviewed him and obtained
the first graphic story of the raid, the search of the Britishers’
homes and the initial interrogations.

The Press Department refused to pass our stories of this in-
terview. It was “investigating” the matter and would let us know
later. The correspondents thereupon adjourned for a council of
war. The unanimous decision was to send the interview by tele-
phone. With a group of foreigners already in prison and opinion
abroad aroused, Moscow could scarcely offend the whole world
by expelling the whole press corps. We each returned to our homes
and sent the Monkhouse account without benefit of blue-pencil.

Late that evening, we were advised that with certain changes
we could cable the interview. Umansky in person would be at his
office to censor the dispatch. Apparently Umansky waited and
waited in vain — only the Times correspondent showed up with the
story. The rest of us, having transmitted the interview without
Umansky’s blessing, naturally did not come to ask for it. This
strange boycott finally puzzled the number one censor and he

BRITISHERS ON TRIAL 563

decided to telephone one of the correspondents to solve the mys-
tery. For my heavy sins, he picked on me.

“Gene.,” he said, “why aren’t you sending the Monkhouse in-
terview? I am now in a position to pass it.”

“Because I have already filed it — by telephone.”

“Mr. Lyons! Please come to see me immediately.”

And so, though all but one of the correspondents had offended
equally, the full force of Comrade Umansky’s indignation was
loosed on my head. Umansky in a classic rage was a comic sight:
Mickey Mouse in a leonine temper. The scene did not sweeten
the atmosphere in which I had my infidel being since I broke
the story of the mass deportations from the Kuban towns.

The following weeks were lurid and electrical with develop-
ments in the Metro-Vickers case. The arrests caused a storm of
patriotic anger in England, and other countries whose nationals
were engaged on Soviet industrial projects were alarmed in vary-
ing degrees. All but one of the accused Britons were freed on bail
— a privilege never granted to Soviet citizens. The British govern-
ment demanded the immediate release of its citizens. (After the
trial and convictions it placed a total embargo on trade with the
U.S.S.R. Butter suddenly became more plentiful in Moscow be-
cause of this embargo.) Sir Esmond Ovey, the Ambassador, was
recalled demonstratively to make a personal report, and reach-
ing London he proceeded to lambaste the Soviet Union and all its
institutions with rather undiplomatic vigor. A batch of English
newspapermen arrived especially to cover this story. The stage
was set for one of the trials of the century.

Sir Esmond’s flaming indignation was particularly distasteful
to the Moscow government. He was a diplomat of liberal persua-
sions who had arrived for his task with typical liberal preconcep-
tions about the great Soviet experiment. At his former post, in
Mexico City, he had watched Dwight Morrow, the American
banker, in the role of good-will Ambassador, and seemed de-
termined to play the same role for his own country in relation
to the land of Soviets. For a while he was the lone “Bolshevik
in the diplomatic corps, apologizing and explaining everything
Soviet as stoutly as any Manchester Guardian emissary. Then he
turned — and in his apostasy grew as sharply critical as any Man-
chester Guar dim emissary in reverse. His case was just one more

DISILLUSIONMENT

564

justification for Moscow’s canny distrust of the liberal breed. It
had learned from sad experience that a militantly pro-Soviet
diplomat or correspondent was a dangerous gamble. A frankly
capitalist representative, without illusions, was at least proof against
disillusionment. Small wonder that many months later the Krem-
lin, outwardly pretending satisfaction over the appointment of
William C. Bullitt as the first American plenipotentiary, actually
viewed him with dire misgivings, only too well borne out by his
subsequent withdrawal in a mood of tight-lipped disappointment.
Mr. Bullitt’s successor, a corporation lawyer with lots of money,
unencumbered by pro-Soviet leanings, was far more to the Krem-
lin’s taste.

Whatever else the Metro-Vickers case was expected to accom-
plish, it succeeded in diverting attention abroad, and to some ex-
tent at home, from the expanding catastrophe in the villages. Not
until the trial was over and forgotten did any of us bother again
with the famine.

2

Two of the six Englishmen tried in the Metropolitan-Vickers
case wrote and signed elaborate confessions of espionage, sabotage,
and bribery during their interrogation by the G.P.U., in which
they involved many of their fellow-countrymen. One of them,
W. H. MacDonald, adhered to his confession at the trial, and the
other, Leslie Thornton, repudiated his effusion. Even the theory
that they were guilty does not suffice to explain their confes-
sions, since every consideration of self-interest and professional
reputation, of loyalty to their friends and patriotism to their gov-
ernment, should have prompted them to deny the charges.

It was not as though they had been confronted with incon-
trovertible proofs of guilt and obliged to accept the inevitable.
Not one tiny scrap of independent evidence to support their ad-
missions was offered by the government, though all foreigners
are under constant surveillance and a thorough search had been
made of the Britishers’ homes and offices. Had they insisted that
they were innocent, it would have pitted their word against the
word of their Soviet employees and associates, and the world’s
public opinion unquestionably would have been on their side.

BRITISHERS ON TRIAL 565

Whatever it may have been that induced these men to tar them-
selves and their colleagues, it was not disclosed by the trial.

More than that : their confessions went beyond the claims of the
prosecution. The Soviet court itself exonerated completely one
of the defendants, A. W. Gregory, who was implicated in those
confessions and at least one of the twenty-seven men listed by
Thornton as spies was in the courtroom as a spectator. The failure
of the G.P.U. to arrest him was at least an implied admission of
his innocence. To this day, though all the Britishers are free and
have small reason to protect the reputation of the G.P.U., no
tenable explanation for those confessions has been forthcoming.
Both MacDonald and Thornton, moreover, have remained in the
employ of the Metropolitan- Vickers Electrical Company despite
the “betrayal,” thus adding another element of mystery to the
whole business.

I sat through every session of that trial and studied the pub-
lished record of the proceedings afterwards. I read the book writ-
ten by Allan Monkhouse, one of the chief defendants. But I am
as much at sea as any casual newspaper customer. Only of this
I feel sure: that the real story, the real compulsions, were located
far behind the scenes. What transpired in the improvised court-
room at the former Nobles’ Club seemed to me little more than
a shadow play on a screen. The tantalizing margin of mystery was
as wide in this trial as in any that preceded it — perhaps wider,
in view of the enormous support that these men had from their
government.

MacDonald, it is true, remained in the hands of the G.P.U. —
practically incommunicado from the moment of his arrest. No
Britisher was given access to him. During the trial, while the other
five Britishers were free on bail between sessions and in constant
touch with the British Embassy people, MacDonald was led off
to his prison cell. A thin, nervous man of twenty-eight, with a
close-cropped goatee and weak, pallid features, a cripple from boy-
hood, he made an unpleasant impression. Watching his twitching
fingers and glazed eyes, we all felt that he was putty under the
manipulating fingers of the Secret Police.

But Thornton had been released from prison eight days before
the trial started. He was constantly with William Strang, the
British charge d'affaires and with Anglo-American correspondents

DISILLUSIONMENT

566

as eager as Mr. Strang to demonstrate that the whole case was a
frame-up. However, though he sought to withdraw his fulsome
confession and referred vaguely to “moral pressure,” he failed to
supply a wholly satisfactory reason for that document.

The conviction that grew in my mind at the time and has been
deepened since then was that immense unseen forces were at work.
The G.P.U. and the prosecution, I came to feel, had a club over
the heads of some of the Britishers. British guilt was involved
(whether of the British Intelligence Service or of individual Brit-
ishers, I dare not surmise), but that guilt referred to matters
which were not even mentioned at the trial. If that theory has any
validity, it was not the first time that men and governments have
accepted responsibility for lesser crimes to conceal larger ones.

Another element in the complicated case to which the corre-
spondents could only hint darkly is the possibility that several
of the Englishmen were protecting people whom they loved.
Most of them had lived in Russia the greater part of their lives
and spoke the language fluently. Monkhouse had been in the
country fairly continuously since 19 11. Thornton’s family, I be-
lieve, had been in business in Russia long before the revolution.
The friendships and intimacies developed in many years may
have enabled the G.P.U. to apply its practical technique of keep-
ing victims in line by threats against people for whom they cared.

Before the trial started, the Press Department called me in and
gave me “inside information” about the love life of Anna Kutusova,
Russian secretary in the Metropolitan- Vickers office who was among
the eleven Russian defendants, and of another woman who did
not appear at the trial. Whether the same information was offered
to other correspondents I do not know. The transparent purpose
was to shock Puritan public opinion in England. I refused, of
course, to send such rubbish. The likelihood that one or more of
the Britishers were protecting the lives and the reputations of these
women, and to that extent under official duress, is certainly not
excluded.

As for the Russians who sat in the dock with the foreigners,
they were true to the monotonous pattern drawn in former demon-
stration trials. With one or two negligible exceptions, they were
panic-stricken, half-hysterical penitents collaborating with the
G.P.U. and the prosecution. The contrast provided by several blunt

BRITISHERS ON TRIAL '567

and self-assured Britons made the belly-crawling of the Russian
group that much uglier and more pathetic.

A blundering, demoralized little man named Gusev, director
of the electrical plant at Zlatoust, confessed to gathering military
information and wrecking machines at his own plant and conceal-
ing alleged defects in English equipment, all for a bribe of three
thousand rubles — about fifteen pounds sterling in real money! An-
other Russian engineer, Kotlyarevsky, testified that he turned over
to MacDonald important secret plans, wrecked a turbine and hid
defects in imported machinery for the munificent bribe of one
thousand rubles, worth perhaps five pounds. The sole witness not
himself under arrest, a certain Dolgov, testified to receiving from
Thornton a bribe of five thousand rubles. Both Thornton and
Monkhouse insisted it was a loan ultimately written off as a gift
when Dolgov failed to repay it. Against the seriousness of the
sabotage and espionage in question, these sums were ludicrously
small. There were few foreigners in Russia who had not loaned or
even made gifts of a few thousand of the inflated nearly worth-
less rubles to Russian friends in distress.

The dreary and repetitious confessions of the Russians provided
the background for the trial. All of them watched for the flick of
Prosecutor Vishinsky’s whip and obeyed with the frightened
alacrity of trained animals. In their “last words” they begged
for their lives and promised to do penance in the tones and the
words that had become a familiar refrain since the Shakhty trial.

The real interest centered around the Englishmen. There was
the morning when Monkhouse stepped to the microphone and in
a clear, precise voice charged that “this trial is a frame-up against
Metropolitan- Vickers engineers based on evidence of terrorized
prisoners.” But he failed signally in the following days to sub-
stantiate that charge. There was the sensational moment when the
pallid, limping MacDonald, as though awaking from a long trance,
suddenly withdrew his confession. A short recess was called after
this sensation, during which MacDonald was removed along with
the Russians. When court resumed, MacDonald seemed to have
relapsed into his stupor of hopelessness — again he attested the truth
of the confession.

A fiery little Welshman, the red-headed Gregory, talked to
the Soviet judges and the prosecutors as they had never been talked

DISILLUSIONMENT

568

to before. He kept exploding with his sense of insulted innocence.
But the state never really pressed its accusations against him. John
Cushny, a tall, swarthy, stolid fellow, was firm and impressive in
his denials. Nordwall, too, would not be shaken in his repudiation
of all the charges.

Few of us pretended to understand the convolutions of this trial,
staged at a critical moment to show the Soviet population and the
world at large why Russian industry was still so ineffective and
liv ing conditions so low though the Five Year Plan was finished.
Those who had the key to the mystery did not use it, have not
used it to this day. But that the case was not proved against
either the Russians or the foreigners seemed plain enough. There
were defense lawyers, Soviet citizens all, timorous pre-revolu-
tionary gentry frightened for their own skins ; but there was no
defense. The most amateur of American or British criminal law-
yers could have shattered the proceedings by asking questions that
were never asked — questions that would focus general charges down
to specific dates, places, sums; questions that would pursue re-
lentlessly the teeming contradictions in the testimony. The line-up
of beards at the defense counsel table, a very museum of beards,
was most impressive; but the accused were left to stumble and
flail through the trial without real guidance and without coordi-
nating their testimony. And as always in these ballyhooed political
trials, the case ended as it began, with confessions and confessions
only, unsupported by external and unimpeachable proofs.

The presiding judge was Comrade Ulrich. I had seen him a year
ago baiting and brow-beating and taunting a half-imbecile boy,
Judas Stem, whom he was about to condemn to death for shooting
at a German Embassy car. In Ulrich’s round podgy face the gods
had modeled a mask of impish, gloating cruelty. His flushed, over-
stuffed features were twisted continuously into a grimace of brutal
sarcasm. The muscles of his mouth seemed incapable of anything
suggesting a judicial expression: that melon-face hovering above
the trial, sneering and jeering, was a caricature of the very idea
of justice. Ulrich’s snarl and grimace had taken the place of Kry-
lenko’s in demonstration trials. In a judge they were infinitely
more obscene than in a prosecutor.*

* Ulrich later achieved international notoriety as presiding* judge in the Zino-
viev-ICameneVj Radek-Piatakov, and Tukhachevsky trials.

BRITISHERS ON TRIAL

569

3

A former dining hall of the Nobles 7 Club, holding perhaps three
hundred spectators, was the scene of the Metro-Vickers show. The
blue walls, the Ionic columns, a frieze of dancing figures at the
ceiling line, gave the proceedings an incongruously frivolous set-
ting. The elaborate broadcasting and photographic arrangements
of previous trials were absent. But the international character of
the case gave the court a resonance that carried to the farthest
corners of the earth. A number of prominent London journalists
had arrived to cover the trial, and the American press was also
keenly interested. The diplomatic corps was well represented. All
of us came and went constantly ; our messengers rushed back and
forth with dispatches 5 the atmosphere was informal and almost
sociable. The fact itself that defendants on trial for such grave
crimes were free between sessions set this demonstration off sharply
from all previous ones. To the Russians such official largesse was
beyond belief.

The lobby outside the courtroom was given over chiefly to the
press. A small room off the lobby was used by the censors; it was
labeled “Doctor 77 and was the place, we wisecracked, where they
performed surgical operations on our dispatches.

Competition among the Anglo-American newspapermen was ex-
tremely sharp. The press agency men especially were working at
an ungodly tension. Every split second was important in the fan-
tastic race which had developed for priority in transmitting tes-
timony. In retrospect that struggle for a few seconds’ advantage
in reporting what Monkhouse or Cushny or Vishinsky said seems
sufficiently grotesque, but at the time it was all very earnest. I
blame upon this tension the farcical climax of the competition.
Those chiefly responsible were genuinely ashamed of what hap-
pened and one by one proffered sheepish apologies to me in the
days after the trial. Whether or not the Metro-Vickers firm was
implicated in a plot, there was at least a full-sized plot among the
Anglo-American correspondents.

Through a few lucky accidents, and perhaps because I was able
to follow the testimony without benefit of interpreters, I had
scored a long series of scoops. In England, where the British

DISILLUSIONMENT

570

United Press was distributing my dispatches, I had been pretty
consistently ahead of Reuters. Although Reuters had sent in a
brilliant journalist, John Fleming (brother of the much-traveled
Peter Fleming), he was at a disadvantage because of language
barriers and lack of familiarity with the Soviet scene. In any case,
my puny triumphs had gotten under the skin of immediate com-
petitors to an extent that I never suspected.

Came the night of the verdict. The judges were deliberating.
It was the last lap in our absurd race against time — speed in flash-
ing the verdict was of immense importance to every one of us. In
the lobby I noticed the American and English reporters whisper-
ing mysteriously. Never suspecting that the whispering had any
relation to my humble self, I approached. Complete and embar-
rassed silence . . . Late that night the judges filed in. We were
tensed to act on the verdict, like runners waiting for the pistol
shot.

I had made no special arrangements for the final dispatch, know-
ing from past experience that there were no short-cuts. But instead
of re mainin g in the courtroom, I waited in the censors’ room,
listening to the proceedings through a pair of earphones. As soon
as the verdict was announced, I scribbled it on a cable blank ; Billy
took it down to our chauffeur who rushed it to the cable office.

It was only later, over highballs at the National bar, that I
learned of the plot against me. That afternoon there had been a
council of war in a hotel room, with all the agency representatives
and most of the special correspondents present. A solemn decision
was reached to “gang up” on the United Press, which had had
too many scoops to be permitted the final coup. All of them, it
was decided, would work together to defeat Lyons.

All contingencies were discussed and arranged for. The verdict
would be relayed from the court to the corridor. Even the time
for running downstairs would be saved — envelopes weighted with
sand were prepared and they would be thrown from the window
to conspirators waiting on the sidewalk. A telephone line would
be kept open between the courthouse and the telegraph building,
with a conspirator stationed at either end. Another would take in-
stant possession of the second phone. Everything was prepared for
the collective defeat of my unsuspecting self.

At the last moment, of course, everything went wrong. The

BRITISHERS ON TRIAL 571

window jammed. The telephone connection was cut off. An in-
coming call from London tied up the second phone. The collapse
of the strategy meant a last-minute scramble, every man for him-
self, with consequent loss of time. By a fluke of luck, that incom-
ing call was for a Russian secretary covering the trial on the side
for a minor British agency, and he was able to beat us all. I was
second, by a good fat margin on all the others. In America, I was
first. Without any special effort — helped rather than hindered by
the plot — I had beaten the gang.

At the bar a few hours later I could not resist exhibiting a
batch of congratulatory messages, specifying the time by which
I had scooped Reuters in London and the opposition agencies in
America. The conspirators looked at one another, shook their heads
sadly, and proceeded to disclose the plot that failed. I had not
the slightest hesitancy in standing drinks on that story.

All but one of the Russians were given prison sentences. Thorn-
ton and MacDonald received three- and two-year terms, respec-
tively. Gregory was acquitted and the other three were condemned
to expulsion from the country. To millions of Russians whose
supreme dream was escape from the country, that “punishment”
must have sounded slightly bizarre.

Dictatorship under an infallible leader calls for a system of
scapegoats. Between the first and the last demonstration trials that
I attended, the Shakhty case and the Metro-Vickers case, I saw
that system shaped toward perfection. Pre-revolutionary engineers,
professors, Mensheviks, foreign technicians had been condemned
and punished to explain difficulties, but the difficulties were not
thereby ended. Not even those among us who were most critical
of the sacrificial rites would have guessed that the system would
be refined further, to the point where by I93^'37 it was destroying
revolutionary military heroes and the fathers of the Bolshevik
revolution themselves.

XV. The Press Corps Conceals a Famine

“THERE is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but
there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.”

This amazing sophistry, culled from a New York Times Mos-
cow dispatch on March 30, 1933, has become among foreign re-
porters the classic example of journalistic understatement. It char-
acterizes sufficiently the whole shabby episode of our failure to
report honestly the gruesome Russian famine of 1932-33.

The circumstance that the government barred us from the
afflicted regions may serve as our formal excuse. But a deaf-and-
dumb reporter hermetically sealed in a hotel room could not have
escaped knowledge of the essential facts. Reporting, as we did daily,
industrial victories in the Baikal region or Tajikistan without per-
sonal investigation, we had small warrant for withholding and
minimizing and diluting the famine story because we were pro-
hibited to make personal investigation. Whatever doubts as to the
magnitude of the disaster may have lingered in our minds, the
prohibition itself should have set at rest.

The episode, indeed, reflects little glory on world journalism
as a whole. Not a single American newspaper or press agency pro-
tested publicly against the astonishing and almost unprecedented
confinement of its correspondent in the Soviet capital or troubled
to probe for the causes of this extraordinary measure.

The New York Times , as the foremost American newspaper,
is automatically selected for investigation in any test of American
reporting. But it was certainly not alone in concealing the famine.
The precious sentence quoted above was prefaced with its corre-
spondent’s celebrated cliche: “To put it brutally — you can’t make
an omelette without breaking eggs.” A later dispatch enlarged
upon the masterpiece of understatement and indicated how the
eggs were being broken. Asserting that “in some districts and
among the large floating population of unskilled labor” there
“have been deaths and actual starvation,” he catalogued the mala-

572

THE PRESS CORPS CONCEALS A FAMINE 573

dies of malnutrition as “typhus, dysentery, dropsy, and various
infantile diseases.” The maladies, in short, that always rage in
time of famine.

Not until August 23 did the Times out of Moscow admit the
famine. “It is conservative to suppose,” it said, that in certain
provinces with a total population of over 40,000,000 mortality
has “at least trebled.” On this basis, there were two million deaths
more than usual. In addition, deaths were also “considerably
increased for the Soviet Union as a whole.” This dispatch came
one day behind an uncensored cable to the New York Herald
Tribune by Ralph Barnes, in which he placed the deaths in his
ultra-conservative fashion at no less than one million. The Barnes
story was front-paged and the Times could no longer ignore the
subject. Its own admission followed, raising Barnes 5 ante. By a
singular twist of logic, the Times story introduced the admission
of famine with this remarkable statement:

Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malig-
nant propaganda. The food shortage which has affected almost the
whole population in the last year and particularly in the grain-pro-
ducing provinces — the Ukraine, North Caucasus, the lower Volga
region — has, however, caused heavy loss of life.

The dividing line between “heavy loss of life 55 through food
shortage and “famine 55 is rather tenuous. Such verbal finessing
made little difference to the millions of dead and dying, to the
refugees who knocked at our doors begging bread, to the lines of
ragged peasants stretching from Torgsin doors in the famine area
waiting to exchange their wedding rings and silver trinkets for
bread.

These philological sophistries, to which we were all driven,
served Moscow 5 s purpose of smearing the facts out of recognition
and beclouding a situation which, had we reported it simply and
clearly, might have worked up enough public opinion abroad to
force remedial measures. And every correspondent, each in his
own measure, was guilty of collaborating in this monstrous hoax
on the world. Maurice Hindus, though among the most indus-
trious apologists for Stalin, was kept waiting nearly a month for
a visa during the famine and finally was admitted on condition
that he should not go outside of Moscow. During his 1933 visit,

574 DISILLUSIONMENT

therefore, he did not go to his native village as in the past. In his
books, articles and lectures, curiously, he does not allude to that
enforced omission and its causes.

The very next day after the Times' half-hearted admission from
Moscow, its representative in Berlin, Frederick T. Birchall, talked
to. a group of foreigners just returned from the famine territory,
among them a reputable American. “The revelations of what they
have seen in the last few weeks,” Birchall cabled, “indicate that
the recent estimate of four million deaths due indirectly to mal-
nutrition in agricultural Russia in recent months may be rather
an understatement than an exaggeration.” The word “malnutri-
tion” had, by dint of repetition, taken hold even outside Russia—
a clean triumph for planned censorship.

All of us had talked with people just returned from the famine
regions. Jack Calder, as honest a man as ever drew a Soviet pay-
check, returned from a long tour of Kazakstan with stories to
curdle one’s blood. Perched on a high stool at the Metropole
valuta bar, we listened to his graphic description of Kazakstan
roads lined with stiff corpses like so many logs. Most of us saw
the pictures taken by German consular officials in the Ukraine
showing scenes of horror reminiscent of the Volga famine of 1921.
Few of us were so completely isolated that we did not meet Rus-
sians whose work took them to the devastated areas, or Muscovites
with relatives in those areas. Around every railroad station in the
capital hundreds of bedraggled refugees were encamped, had we
needed further corroboration j they gathered faster than the police
could clear them away.

The truth is that we did not seek corroboration for the simple
reason that we entertained no doubts on the subject. There are
facts too large to require eyewitness confirmation — facts so per-
vasive and generally accepted that confirmation would be futile
pedantry. There was no more need for investigation to establish
the mere existence of the Russian famine than investigation to
establish the existence of the American depression. Inside Russia
the matter was not disputed. The famine was accepted as a matter
of course in our casual conversation at the hotels and in our homes.
In the foreign colony estimates of famine deaths ranged from one
million up} among Russians from three millions up. Russians,
especially communists, were inclined to cite higher figures through

THE PRESS CORPS CONCEALS A FAMINE 575

a sort of perverse pride in bigness; if it called for Bolshevik firm-
ness to let a million die, it obviously called for three times as
much firmness to kill off three million. . . .

The first reliable report of the Russian famine was given to
the world by an English journalist, a certain Gareth Jones, at one
time secretary to Lloyd George. Jones had a conscientious streak
in his make-up which took him on a secret journey into the Ukraine
and a brief walking tour through its countryside. That same streak
was to take him a few years later into the interior of China during
political disturbances, and was to cost him his life at the hands of
Chinese military bandits. An earnest and meticulous little man,
Gareth Jones was the sort who carries a note-book and unasham-
edly records your words as you talk. Patiently he went from one
correspondent to the next, asking questions and writing down the
answers.

On emerging from Russia, Jones made a statement which, start-
ling though it sounded, was little more than a summary of what
the correspondents and foreign diplomats had told him. To pro-
tect us, and perhaps with some idea of heightening the authenticity
of his reports, he emphasized his Ukrainian foray rather than our
conversation as the chief source of his information.

In any case, we all received urgent queries from our home
offices on the subject. But the inquiries coincided with preparations
under way for the trial of the British engineers. The need to re-
main on friendly terms with the censors at least for the duration
of the trial was for all of us a compelling professional necessity.

Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any
of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes — but
throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical for-
mulas of equivocation. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most
surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly
garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials.

The scene in which the American press corps combined to repu-
diate Jones is fresh in my mind. It was in the evening and Com-
rade Umansky, the soul of graciousness, consented to meet us in
the hotel room of a correspondent. He knew that he had a stra-
tegic advantage over us because of the Metro-Vickers story. He
could afford to be gracious. Forced by competitive journalism to

DISILLUSIONMENT

576

jockey for the inside track with officials, it would have been pro-
fessional suicide to make an issue of the famine at this particular
time. There was much bargaining in a spirit of gentlemanly give-
and-take, under the effulgence of Umansky ? s gilded smile, before
a formula of denial was worked out.

We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in round-
about phrases that damned Jones as a liar. The filthy business
having been disposed of, someone ordered vodka and zakuski y
Umansky joined the celebration, and the party did not break up
until the early morning hours. The head censor was in a mellower
mood than I had ever seen him before or since. He had done a
big bit for Bolshevik firmness that night.

We were summoned to the Press Department one by one and
instructed not to venture out of Moscow without submitting a
detailed itinerary and having it officially sanctioned. In effect,
therefore, we were summarily deprived of the right of unhampered
travel in the country to which we were accredited.

“This is nothing new,” Umansky grimaced uncomfortably.
“Such a rule has been in existence since the beginning of the revo-
lution. Now we have decided to enforce it.”

New or old, such a rule had not been invoked since the civil
war days. It was forgotten again when the famine was ended.
Its undisguised purpose was to keep us out of the stricken regions.
The same department which daily issued denials of the famine
now acted to prevent us from seeing that famine with our own
eyes. Our brief cables about this desperate measure of concealment
were published, if at all, in some obscure corner of the paper. The
world press accepted with complete equanimity the virtual expul-
sion of all its representatives from all of Russia except Moscow.
It agreed without protest to a partnership in the macabre hoax.

Other steps were taken to prevent prying. Until then, foreigners
arriving at the frontier received their passports as soon as the
train got under way. Now the passports were retained by the
authorities until just before the train pulled into Moscow — thus
guaranteeing that no foreigner would drop off en route for un-
chaperoned research.

When M. Herriot, the liberal French statesman, arrived in
Russia at Odessa, the one French correspondent in the country,

THE PRESS CORPS CONCEALS A FAMINE 57 7

M. Lusiani, demanded the right to meet him. The Press Depart-
ment finally gave its permission — on Lusiani’s solemn undertaking
to remain with the official party and not to stray into the country-
side. M. Herriot, conducted along the prescribed road between
Odessa and Moscow, completely surrounded by high functionaries,
was able to say honestly when he returned to Paris that he had
not personally seen any famine. Neither had Lusiani.

I was not the first Moscow observer to remark that God seems
to be on the side of the atheists. What the Kremlin would have
prayed for, had it believed in prayer, was perfect weather, and
that is what it received that spring and summer: perfect weather
and bumper crops. The fields had been planted under the aegis
of the newly established Politotdyels (Political Departments) with
unlimited authority over the peasants. Food rations barely suffi-
cient to sustain life had been distributed only to those actually at
work in the fields. Red Army detachments in many places had
been employed to guard seed and to prevent hungry peasants from
devouring the green shoots of the new harvest. In the midst of
the famine, the planting proceeded, and the crops came up strong
and plenteous. The dead were buried — for the living there would
be bread enough and to spare in the following winter.

Belatedly the world had awakened to the famine situation. We
were able to write honestly that “to speak of famine now is ridicu-
lous.” We did not always bother to add that we had failed to
speak of it or at best mumbled incomprehensibly then, when it
was not ridiculous. Cardinal Innitzer, Archbishop of Vienna, made
the first of his sensational statements about Soviet agrarian condi-
tions on August 20, when those conditions were already being
mitigated. Certain anti-Soviet newspapers in England and America
began to write about the famine at about the time it was ended,
and continued to write about it long after it had become history:
their facts were on the whole correct, but their tenses were badly
mixed. The most rigorous censorship in all of Soviet Russia’s his-
tory had been successful— it had concealed the catastrophe until it
was ended, thereby bringing confusion, doubt, contradiction into
the whole subject. Years after the event— when no Russian com-

DISILLUSIONMENT

57 8

munist in his senses any longer concealed the magnitude of the
famine — the question whether there had been a famine at all was
still being disputed in the outside world!

In the autumn, the Soviet press was exultant. Lazar Kaganovich
was given most of the credit for the successful harvest. It was his
mind that invented the Political Departments to lead collectivized
agriculture, his iron hand that applied Bolshevik mercilessness.
Now that a healing flood of grain was inundating the famished
land, the secrecy gradually gave way. Increasingly with every pass-
ing month Russian officials ceased to deny the obvious. Soviet
journalists who had been in the afflicted areas now told me per-
sonally such details of the tragedy as not even the eager imagina-
tions of Riga and Warsaw journalists had been able to project.
They were able to speak in the past tense, so that their accents
were proud boasts rather than admissions.

The Kremlin, in short, had “gotten away with it.” At a cost
in millions of lives, through the instrumentalities of hunger and
terror, socialized agriculture had been made to yield an excellent
harvest. Certain observers now insisted in print that the efficacy
of collectivization had been demonstrated 5 nothing, of course, had
been demonstrated except the efficacy of concentrated force used
against a population demoralized by protracted hunger.

There were few peasant homes in the worst of the famine dis-
tricts which had not paid a toll in life for this harvest. In hundreds
of villages half the population was gone: some had been killed
by the “diseases of malnutrition” and others had fled to seek food.
In September and October, Chamberlin, Duranty, and others who
visited southern Russia still found half-deserted villages. It would
be years before the memory of this fearful time would lose its
poignancy in the Ukraine and North Caucasus, in Kazakstan and
Lower Volga. And there were those who believed, as I did, that
the memory was indelible and would rise to plague those who
had decided in cold blood to let the villages starve. But in the
cities, at least, a new optimism was born.

The attitude of the professional friends of the U.S.S.R. on the
famine went through a curious cycle. First, while the disaster was
under way, they made furious denials. Since then, they have tended
to admit the facts but to explain them away as unavoidable, and
as a just and proper punishment meted out to a “rebellious” peas-

THE PRESS CORPS CONCEALS A FAMINE S7 9

antry. “Why harp on something that is by now history?” sums
up their reproachful objection to a reminder of the period. But
all great social crimes, given time, become history. By that fan-
tastic logic, time has wiped out the guilt of those who perpetrated
the Inquisition and the St. Bartholomew’s Night massacres, the
World War and the fascist destruction of Vienna’s socialist hous-
ing, the Reichstag fire and the fascist attack on democratic govern-
ment in Spain. The Kremlin had foreseen the famine and per-
mitted it to run its course of death and horror for political reasons.
The philosophy which made such a decision possible, the mad
arrogance of rulers condemning millions to death, are not justified
by the fact that the dead are buried and the survivors being fed.

How many millions actually died will never be known accu-
rately. It is not generally understood abroad that the Soviet gov-
ernment stopped the publication of vital statistics for the period in
question y although such statistics were published as a matter of
routine in previous years ; otherwise it would be a simple matter
to compare the death-rate for the winter and spring of 1932-33
with the normal death-rate.

Estimates made by foreigners and Russians range from three
to seven millions. Chamberlin, after his journey through the
devastated districts, described in detail in his Russia’s Iron Age ,
placed the cost in life at four million. Duranty, after a similar
journey, withdrew his previous estimate that the death-rate had
increased threefold as far as the North Caucasus was concerned
but stated that “he is inclined to believe that the estimate he made
for the Ukraine was too low.” A more than trebled death-rate in
the Ukraine would bring the famine deaths in that one area alone
to a million and a half. Maurice Hindus, after years of vagueness
on the subject, finally settled on “at least three million” as his
estimate.

Southern Russia, after many months of total news blockade,
was opened to foreign correspondents in easy stages. The first to
be given permission to travel in the forbidden zones were the
technically “friendly” reporters, whose dispatches might be counted
upon to take the sting out of anything subsequent travelers might
report. Duranty, for instance, was given a two weeks’ advantage
over most of us. On the day he returned, it happened, Billy and
I were dining with Anne O’Hare McCormick, roving correspon-

DISILLUSIONMENT

580

dent for the New York Times > and her husband. Duranty joined
us. He gave us his fresh impressions in brutally frank terms and
they added up to a picture of ghastly horror. His estimate of the
dead from famine was the most startling I had as yet heard from
anyone.

“But, Walter, you don’t mean that literally?” Mrs. McCormick
exclaimed.

“Hell I don’t. . . . I’m being conservative,” he replied, and
as if by way of consolation he added his famous truism: “But
they’re only Russians. . .

Once more the same evening we heard Duranty make the same
estimate, in answer to a question by Laurence Stallings, at the
railroad station, just as the train was pulling out for the Polish
frontier. When the issues of the Times carrying Duranty’s own
articles reached me I found that they failed to mention the large
figures he had given freely and repeatedly to all of us.

XVI. Forebodings

LIKE the proverbial candle about to expire, my reputation in
official eyes flared up again brightly before it was snuffed out
utterly. My attitude toward the trial of the Britons threatened
briefly to restore me to the good graces of the Soviet powers.
Almost alone among the Anglo-American reporters I had taken
an undeviating stand on the right of the Soviet government to
try foreigners accused of crimes within its frontiers. London’s per-
emptory demands for immediate surrender of its citizens seemed
to me to smack of extraterritoriality. The trial itself, at least as
far as it applied to the accused foreigners, seemed to me a closer
approximation of justice than any previous demonstration trial.

Outwardly correct, the British Embassy crowd soon made me
feel that my point of view was not to its liking. Certain of the
Embassy officials were outspoken in their criticism of my dispatches,
which were being widely used throughout the British Empire.
I was permitted to attend the general press conferences but care-
fully excluded from the more intimate Embassy gatherings. I was
never invited, for instance, to lunch with the defendants between
sessions as were several other Americans and all the British re-
porters.

Soon after the trial, several communist friends brought me the
same message in almost the same words. Government circles, they
said in mysterious undertones, were fully cognizant of the British
hostility toward me and greatly impressed with my handling of
the trial. Comrade Umansky himself began to look at me less
venomously. Everyone was in a mood to forgive past recalcitrance ;
they were only watching to see whether the change was permanent
or a passing whim.

Let no one suppose that official favor is a small thing in the
atmosphere of an authoritarian state. In a hundred ways life be-
comes simplified, mellowed, warmed by an inner sense of strength.
Over and above the physical and professional advantages is the

DISILLUSIONMENT

582

feeling of being integral with power. Think of the glow in which
Americans who have made themselves spokesmen for the Soviets
to their countrymen march through each day, feeling themselves
monitors of communist respectability. Think of their heart-warm-
ing illusion, as they join the political shop-talk of local pomposities,
that they are in some measure architects of a new world.

The real medium of exchange in Moscow, buying that which
neither rubles nor dollars can touch, was power. And power meant
Comrade Stalin, Comrade Umansky, the virtuoso of kombmMsya ,
the fellow whose uncle’s best friend has a cousin on the collegium
of the G.P.U. To be invited to exclusive social functions, to play
bridge with the big-bugs, to be patted on the back editorially by
Pravda , to have the social ambitions of one’s wife flattered: such
inducements are more effective in bridling a correspondent’s tongue
than any threats. The sense of importance that comes with being
accepted tacitly as an accredited interpreter for an entire govern-
ment weighs heavily in the scales of mundane judgment in decid-
ing how to phrase an embarrassing piece of news or whether to
transmit it all. By the same token, the consciousness of being re-
jected by the new environment (and dictatorial governments are
past masters in the art of salting the wounds of ostracism) is not
easy to bear.

Whether in Moscow or Berlin, Tokyo or Rome, all the temp-
tations for the practicing foreign reporter are in the direction of
conformity. It is more comfortable and in the long run more
profitable to soft-pedal a dispatch for readers thousands of miles
away than to face an irate censor and closed official doors. The
simplest formula for judging contradictory information sent by
any two correspondents from a dictated capital is this: The cor-
respondent less “friendly” to the ruling group, less eager to give
the dictators the benefit of every doubt, is likely to be more
dependable. There may be exceptions to this rule, of course. But
there can be no doubt that every leverage of self-interest works
in the dictators’ favor.

It would be useless to pretend that such considerations had no
effect upon me. If anywhere in these pages I have unwittingly
implied that my armor of righteousness was impervious, I renounce
the implication. The sudden easing of tension in my relations with
the authorities was more than welcome. If I relapsed again all

FOREBODINGS

583

too quickly into waywardness it was despite myself. Some pestifer-
ous element in my make-up — call it a social conscience or some
less polite name — led me astray. Instead of resting content with
the manicured mendacities provided in daily instalments by the
press, it incited me to probe precisely where probing was verboten.

And I did probe assiduously. Of necessity I remained cautious
and diplomatic in my writing, but I stored up forbidden knowl-
edge. I managed to talk at length with people who had spent many
years in prison camps and “isolators.” From eyewitnesses I gar-
nered details of the horrors in famine areas. From heartsore com-
munists I learned the magnitude and depth of the shams and
fears and toe-licking sycophancy that soiled the inner life of the
ruling Party.

I had shed the last of the veils of political inhibition in search-
ing out the facts behind the formulas. In retrospect I now recog-
nized how painstakingly I had fooled myself in the earlier years
— how I had been wont to take long detours in my observations
and longer ones in my thinking to avoid truths that hurt too much.
The need for evasion to spare my own feelings had fallen away.

Increasingly I sensed the strength of the underground currents
directed against the government 5 not the monarchists or Men-
sheviks or vengeful kulaks of the editorials but communists and
ex-communists were the people whom these currents touched.
Unorganized, isolated, desperately afraid, they were conscious, all
the same, that they were not alone. In meeting communists I
could often sense whether their basic loyalties were toward the
revolution as such or toward the Kremlin clique on whom their
jobs depended.

In America in the following years, watching the process of the
liquidation of the revolution, I was not surprised, therefore, to
find that those told off by the Kremlin for destruction were almost
all communists. The process, first unmistakably manifest in the
abolition of the Society of Old Bolsheviks, led inevitably to the
physical annihilation of most of the remaining leaders of the 1917
revolution. It led to the purging of the G.P.U. of the “Chekist”
elements, whose psychological commitments were to the original
revolution rather than to the present incumbents of the Kremlin.
It led to the killing off of military leaders whose careers stemmed
from the pre-Stalin years.

DISILLUSIONMENT

54

These things were still in the future. But sensing them as I did,
a genuine reconciliation with the powers-that-be was out of the
question.

2

Karl Bickel, President of the United Press, arrived for his sec-
ond visit to Russia during my incumbency. Fully aware of the
hardships of covering a “beat” like mine, he seemed on the whole
perturbed by the change that had come into his correspondent’s
relations with the Soviet authorities since his visit four years earlier.
The first and irreducible need of a press agency is for the most
cordial relations possible with all governments. An individual
newspaper might refuse to play with obdurate dictatorships, but
an agency cannot afford the luxury of independence. It must accept
the rules of the game set by a Mussolini or Hitler or Stalin, since
it must cover the entire map all the time. It is geared, moreover,
for instantaneous reporting in which a margin of a few minutes
is of crucial competitive importance. If that margin must be paid
for with an occasional reticence, the price does not seem unreason-
able.

Americans who suppose that editors are inclined to cheer their
correspondents in the fearless pursuit of truth have a naively
idyllic view of modern journalism. They forget that the principal
commodity of the newspaper is news, not truth, and the two do
not always coincide. A newspaperman with a crusading streak will
soon be out of a job. The correspondent who gets himself expelled
or even disliked for talking out of turn puts his employers to
great expense and, more important, endangers their sources of
information.

Bickel realized that I was no longer happy on my Moscow post.
He realized, too, that the man who survives six years under a
dictatorship without becoming a messenger boy for the ruling
dynasty has something of an achievement to his credit. He sounded
out whether I was interested in taking over the management of
the Tokyo Bureau; but the Tokyo assignment at the time called
for more executive work than straight reporting, and I declined
the tentative offer.

Bickel was one of those rare press agency titans with a genuine
interest in world affairs aside from their commercial value as news.

FOREBODINGS

585

A thoroughgoing liberal by nature, the Russian revolution touched
his imagination from the very beginning. He watched its evolu-
tion with sympathy which often bordered on enthusiasm. On this
visit, too, he was indefatigable in gathering views and facts. The
interview that impressed him most was with Karl Radek, the
Puck of the communist revolution. We remained with Radek in
his penthouse home overlooking the Moscow river for more than
an hour. The conversation ranged freely in time and space. The
scope of Radek’s information was little short of miraculous: he
could discuss the local politics of Chicago with as intimate knowl-
edge as the politics of Moscow. There was a gargoyle quality in
Radek’s face, a sort of fascinating ugliness. His features, in a
frame of unkempt brownish hair, seemed curiously out of focus $
his teeth charred and uneven , his eyes very much alive behind
thick glasses, like frisky pups behind plate glass. Aside from his
looks, Radek’s personality was memorable not because of his as-
tonishing erudition but because that erudition was coupled with
a sparkling sense of humor. We left his presence feeling as though
we had watched a one-man circus crowded with incredible feats
of intellectual agility.

The larger part of that summer I spent with my family in
San Remo, soaking in Italian sunshine. This time we took Genie
back to Moscow with us. The school in which she had spent four
years was still permitted by the Hitler dictatorship to carry on,
but only after its progressive tradition of several generations had
been crushed. After some investigation we placed Genie in one of
Moscow’s model schools, on Pimenovsky Pereulok, where the
two young children of Stalin were her schoolmates.

The modernistic experiments in education which had won the
hearts of the John Deweys had by this time been thrown out. The
children now sat with their hands behind their backs, took regular
examinations, and concentrated on the three R’s. The classrooms
— fifty to sixty pupils to one teacher — reminded me of my own
elementary school days in New York thirty years before: from
;an extreme of Daltonesque modernism the Soviet school system
had apparently swung to the opposite extreme of stodginess.

Genie’s celebrity in the school overshadowed that of the Stalin
children. She was an Amerikcmka, from the fabulous land of sky-

DISILLUSIONMENT

586

scrapers and wondrous machines on the other side of the world —
her foreign clothes, her outlandish accent, her long Germanic
braids, and straight long-limbed loveliness endlessly exciting to
her classmates. Our daughter’s scrambled American-German-Rus-
sian education worked havoc with her curriculum, but It enriched
her mind far beyond the average child’s, and physically she had
developed into a tall, graceful and finely coordinated specimen of
girlhood.

3

I sloshed through the October muds of Leningrad, from insti-
tute to institute and museum to museum, interviewing bearded
professors and moth-eaten curators and eager young people who
talked even of paleozoic fossils in terms of the Piatiletka.

I had undertaken the ambitious job of a journalistic survey of
scientific research in progress and found that the center of gravity
in this domain was located in the old capital, where the Academy
of Science had its headquarters, where the venerable Professor
Pavlov conducted his experiments in conditioned reflexes. Perhaps
because I was concentrating my attention on museums and labora-
tories, the curious illusion grew upon me that the whole city was
a sort of museum and laboratory combined. Social experiment and
vivisection amidst the petrified remnants of the old life. The bat-
tered survivors of the antien regime seemed more in evidence in
this city which had been the center of fashion and power than in
the Soviet capital. The spires of Peter and Paul, the majestic
Neva, the brackish canals, the old official buildings in pastel shades,
had failed somehow to adjust themselves to the new life.

My mind was now made up to leave Russia as soon as I could.
The feeling that I was seeing Leningrad for the last time gave
the crowded visit an emotional obbligato. Billy and I took in
the theaters and ballet and dined at the Hotel Astoria, which was
to Leningrad what the Metropole was to Moscow: a fake-bour-
geois retreat from the Soviet world. An extraterritorial jazz band
filled the tinselly restaurant with strange versions of Western dance
music and self-conscious Russians fox-trotted and blackbottomed
jerkily in a style all their own. Waiters of pre-revolutionary vin-
tage in soiled jackets showed an archaic obsequiousness to valuta
customers. The furtive desperation that made the counterfeit gai-
ety of the Metropole so pathetic was even more poignant here.

FOREBODINGS

587

A few old-world creatures sat uneasily in the deepest corners, as
though poised for flight at the first sign of danger 3 museum pieces,
they seemed, of another epoch.

A good deal of this haunting and slightly tragic museum quality
attached to the palatial home of Alexei Tolstoy, the great novelist,
at Dyetskoye Selo. Almost alone among Russians, Tolstoy lived
in baronial style in a rambling many-roomed old mansion stocked
with rich antiques. Around his table, the night we visited him, were
some thirty people, and there was little in the snow-white em-
broidered linens, the silverware, the crystal, the many vintages and
abundant food to remind one of the clamorous slogans and liqui-
dations outside. Tolstoy himself, fat and expansively hospitable,
looking a little like G. K. Chesterton, seemed an old-fashioned
barin out of Turgenyev’s pages, surrounded by his family and
guests and retainers. The conversation, the musicale after the din-
ner, the whole atmosphere of ripe old-world culture seemed a
throw-back to a nearly forgotten period. In his work-room up-
stairs, that nostalgic character was even more distinct. A death-
mask of Peter the Great (one of three such masks in existence)
struck the keynote in an ivory tower seemingly remote in time
and space from the raucous Soviet existence — a chamber spacious,
mellowed, insulated ; a window set into the angle of a gable framed
an immemorial Russian winter scene of huddled cottages and
church cupolas.

“This,” he said, “is where I work on my trilogy on the life of
Peter. One of my ancestors, you know, was a power in Peter’s
court.”

Returning far past midnight from the Tolstoy mansion, the
crisp snow crunching under the wheels of an Astoria Hotel valuta
car, I felt as though I had visited a perfectly preserved section
of Nineteenth Century Russia.

Leningrad is a city of lurid memories. This swampland turned
into a modern city by the ferocious will of one Asiatic despot, the
flesh and blood of a hundred thousand serfs kneaded into its foun-
dations, has known more of orgy and extravagance, of autocratic
blood-letting and popular fury, than the rest of the country put
together. The name of Lenin has been pasted on it, but it is still
essentially the city of the fabulous Peter, that savage in Western
garb. Under the drabness of the city’s latest incarnation there is
a teeming ghost world of purple and crimson shadows. Exploring

DISILLUSIONMENT

588

its by-ways, strolling along its embankments, inspecting the dun-
geons under the old fortress, I had the sense of nearness to the
past — the feeling that the Soviet episode is but a moment in the
long life of Peter’s hand-tooled capital.

My scientific prowling was cut short by an urgent summons from
Moscow. President Roosevelt had invited President Kalinin to
discuss the resumption of diplomatic relations between their gov-
ernments and 1 had to take the next train back to Moscow. The
hasty retreat from Leningrad meant the cancellation of an inter-
view scheduled with the “Stalin of the North,” Sergei Kirov, a
member of the Politburo and one of the strong men of the ruling
Party. Kirov had never been interviewed ; few foreigners had
even seen him. He had promised to receive me in the next few
days. A year later, when Kirov was killed by a young communist,
I had additional cause to regret the chance that had deprived
me of a close-up view of the man.

The establishment of diplomatic relations with the United
States was the consummation of the Soviet Union’s most cherished
political dream. Regardless what we felt about Soviet internal
affairs, we were gratified by this sensible American move. Any-
thing which helped to break down Russia’s isolation, which made
the Kremlin more concerned with the public opinion of the outside
world, seemed to me urgently desirable from the vantage point
of the Russian masses. The deeper Russia was driven into its own
Asiatic skin, the less hope there seemed to me of salvaging the
gains of the revolution.

For the American colony in Moscow, and for the correspondents
in particular, there were rounds of receptions, interviews with
Soviet leaders, a new friendliness. But personally I knew that my
assignment was nearing its close. With recognition, a quiet but
persistent purge of “recalcitrant” American correspondents was in
the cards. Practically all the American newspapermen in Moscow
— Chamberlin, Barnes, Wells, Stanley Richardson, myself — were
destined to leave, for one reason or another, in the months after
the Soviet-American rapprochement. Those who came to take
their place could know the horrors of the “Iron Age” only at
second hand.

BOOK 5

REDEDICATION

I. My Recall from Moscow

IN THOSE narrow circles in America where purblind Soviet
fanaticism feeds upon self-deception, every defection from the
ranks of the faithful is instantly matched by a standardized ex-
planation. It is simpler and psychologically more satisfying to
annihilate the critic than to deal with his criticism.

For years the Christian Science Monitor representative, Cham-
berlin, was held in high esteem in those circles. When he turned
critical, an easy explanation was hatched by alarmed American be-
lievers. The story was spread industriously that he had been mis-
led by the Russian Princess to whom he was married. The “prin-
cess” was only a New York schoolteacher of Russian- Jewish ex-
traction whom Chamberlin married before he went to Russia, but
fables are more stubborn things than facts.

“Unfriendly” reports by correspondents were explained airily
on the basis of economic determinism — hirelings of the kept press
doing the bidding of their capitalist masters. But “friendly” re-
ports by no less capitalistic reporters were exempted from this
Marxist law.

Every returning engineer who hinted that all was not rose-
tinted in the land of Soviets was obviously an incompetent giving
vent to his private grudges. But engineers who joined in the halle-
lujahs at Friends of the U.S.S.R. banquets, though they were
making fortunes out of Soviet contracts, were high-minded gentry
in no wise affected by crass considerations of self-interest.

Around my own recall from Moscow, and my decline from offi-
cial grace, that inclement fanaticism has woven a dark saga of
intricate absurdity. Years after the event, new fantasies continued
to be embroidered on the somber fabric. Ever so often the echoes
of some new and more extravagant fable reached me, by way of
accounting for my views on the Bolshevik land. Such legendry
thrives on its own grotesqueness, each new absurdity sprouting a

59i

REDEDICATION

59 ^

dozen sustaining absurdities in the hopeless groping for the foun-
dation that is not there.

The American move for recognition of the U.S.S.R., toward
the end of 1933, it was generally assumed in both Washington
and Moscow, was motivated in large measure by President Roose-
velt’s anxiety over the war danger in the Far East. It was felt
that a sign of American friendship would act as a brake on the
ambitions of the Japanese military party. The Soviet press made
all the political capital it could out of the impending Russian-
American rapprochement. The United States was pictured as a
great peace-loving republic which, with the sturdy Soviet republic
by its side, would help preserve international peace.

The world at this time seethed with talk of war in the Far East.
Huge armies were deployed on both sides of the Soviet-Man-
churian frontier, and mutual charges of violating that frontier flew
like sparks from the respective capitals. All the tinder was piled
up for a conflagration and any one of those sparks might ignite a
war. Border incidents with loss of life were taking place constantly,
and it was an open secret that some of those clashes were more
serious than the press dared reveal.

Early in November the Soviet press charged Japanese war
planes with flying over the Soviet border. Tokyo papers countered
with similar charges against Russian planes. Probably both sides
were telling the truth; it was only to be expected that each army
would reconnoiter the other’s terrain, at the risk of being shot
down as intruders. There were also charges of equivalent violations
on the rivers and the sea. Tokyo talked of Soviet coastal batteries
having fired on Japanese fishing trawlers. Despite the formal de-
nials, Russians close to military affairs chuckled knowingly; the
“fishing trawlers,” they hinted, were disguised naval reconnoiter-
ing parties and they only got what was coming to them.

The annual November parade in Moscow was, more than ever
before, a pointed military demonstration, climaxed by an unprece-
dented turn-out of war planes that blackened the skies over Red
Square. Instinctively, all of us on the reviewing stands turned our
eyes toward the Japanese military and naval attaches as the planes
roared overhead, and the Soviet newsreels a few days later cut in

MY RECALL FROM MOSCOW 593

significant glimpses of these foreign observers as the tanks and
cavalry divisions and airplanes were shown.

At the formal reception to the diplomats and correspondents
on the evening of November 7, at the Spasso-Peskovsky palace
that later became the American Embassy, the whispered talk re-
volved around the dangerous situation in the Far East. Several
diplomatic acquaintances spoke to me of the reports going the
rounds about serious incidents in the Far East.

It was at this reception, incidentally, that I first met Alexander
Troyanovsky. When I confronted him with the news that he was
scheduled to go to Washington as his country’s first Ambassador,
the tone of his denial only confirmed the correctness of my infor-
mation. That very evening I cabled that Alexander Troyanovsky
was the likely choice for Washington, pointing out the fact that
his long experience in Tokyo gave a fine political point to his
choice.

Litvinov had left for the United States, accompanied by several
other officials, among them Comrade Umansky. For reasons that
surpassed our understanding, or possibly from an ingrained habit
of mystery, their departure was treated as a major state secret.
The entire press corps was therefore on the station to watch them
going off. Umansky, characteristically, went out of his way to
throw us off his trail, under a comic illusion that his movements
were of international moment. At a banquet given by Intourist,
he took the trouble to announce publicly that he was on his way
to Spain, so that no one was surprised when he showed up in
New York.

On the evening of November 9, I had several guests at my
home, among them a Japanese newspaperman. Inevitably the Far
Eastern incidents— particularly the airplane and fishing vessels epi-
sodes — were mentioned. No one doubted the authenticity of the
reports, least of all my Japanese colleague. His attitude suggested,
indeed, that he knew more about it than he cared to discuss. I did
not dream of cabling those reports, of course.

Several days later, I was preparing to go to a concert. Just then
two Russian friends, both of whom I knew to be well connected
in the higher circles of the G.P.U., arrived for an unexpected visit.
I told Billy to go on to the concert alone, while I entertained the
guests. Even today, when the whole strange business is surely

594 REDEDICATION

known to the Soviet authorities in its minutest details, I am in-
hibited against using the names of these guests. I shall refer to
them as Ivanov and Petrov.

They were both in exceptionally gay spirits— not a little height-
ened, it is true, by vodka. I inquired the cause of their exalted
mood and they proceeded to tell me, interrupting one another to
add gleeful details to the recital. Their hilarity, it seemed, derived
from the stinging lesson their military forces had given to Japa-
nese intruders in Soviet territory in recent weeks.

“The sons of she-dogs will be more careful about poking around
where they’re not wanted,” Ivanov exclaimed. . _

And Petrov, slapping his thighs and smacking his lips, con-
firmed this conviction. Between them they presented me in star-
tling detail a complete account of the two Far Eastern episodes
that were being so widely discussed in the capital. Japanese bomb-
ing planes which had penetrated far into Siberian territory had been
shot down by Soviet anti-aircraft batteries. Prowling Japanese
naval boats had been destroyed by the coast guards. They even
described how the Japanese bodies removed from the airplane
wreckage had been returned to the hlanchurian side.

I never doubted the truth of their stories. Everything they said
fitted perfectly into what I had heard elsewhere. They provided
the missing pieces for the jigsaw puzzle of reports and rumors.
But I wondered why they were speaking to a correspondent so
freely and fully on a matter of grave international importance.
Not in all my Soviet years had critical information been conveyed
to me by responsible communists quite so candidly. _

“This is sensational news you are giving me,” I said5 “aren t
you afraid I might use it? You’ve confirmed what many of the
correspondents have picked up in the last few days from other
sources. You know, it’s a great temptation to cable the story. . ■ •
Normally, the hint of publication gives Soviet citizens the jit-
ters. Neither Ivanov nor Petrov, however, bothered to caution me
against using their information. On the contrary, even after I sug-
gested that I might do so, they continued to add color to the pic-
ture. Afterwards, when I became the center of a major scandal,
the foreign colony, including most of the American correspondents,
were convinced that I had been “framed.” Possibly I allowed my-
self naively to be taken in. The simple fact is that I got the

MY RECALL FROM MOSCOW 595

specific impression that they wanted me to send the story of the
Far Eastern incidents , that their primary purpose in visiting me
that evening was to encourage me to send this news.

It seemed to me logical at the moment, moreover, that Moscow
should want these incidents known to the outside world. The ten-
sion in the Far East was one of Litvinov’s best cards in his nego-
tiations with Roosevelt. Obviously, I thought, Moscow wants this
story sent in order to impress Americans with the seriousness of
the Far Eastern situation and the boldness of Japanese aggression.
There were flaws in this logic no doubt, but it seemed crystal
clear to me that evening. Like the man who walked through a
plate-glass window, I could only say afterwards that “it seemed
to me a good idea at the time.”

When Ivanov and Petrov left, I typed out a brief dispatch on
the subject of their disclosures. It was carefully couched in the
subjunctive mood and described the information as “unconfirmed
reports” having wide currency in high quarters. Both govern-
ments, I added, would be certain to deny these reports, having
reached a tacit agreement not to make a public issue of the inci-
dents. Having written the dispatch, I laid it aside. My better
judgment told me that it was loaded with dynamite and that I
ought to let it alone, even if the Soviet authorities did seem eager
to have it transmitted.

My better judgment, however, was not equal to the occasion.
As hard luck would have it, a long-distance call came through
from the London office of the United Press, on a totally different
matter. At the end of the conversation, the voice at the other end
said:

“Anything new in Moscow, Gene?”

And I yielded to the temptation, the temptation only a news-
paperman can fully appreciate, of scoring a scoop.

“Yes,” I said, “lots of news. Take down this dispatch.”

I dictated the brief message about the two Far Eastern incidents.

Even as I dictated it, I felt that I was making a blunder. Almost
as soon as I dropped the receiver, I regretted having been maneu-
vered into filing a story that could only bring official denials and
leave me “holding the bag.” In less than an hour I had London
on the phone again, with the purpose of “killing” the dispatch.

REDEDICATION

596

But a press agency works too fast for that. The startling news
had already gone around the world.

2

A few hours later, hell broke loose, and its fires of fury played
around my hapless head for weeks. I found myself at the dizzy
center of a whirlpool of intrigue, lies, fears, some of which are
still spinning.

The subjunctive mood of my dispatch got lost in the shuffle. The
careful qualifications were for the most part shed in transit and
my story, as published on the world’s front pages, gave as specific
facts what I had sent as unconfirmed reports. The Moscow corre-
spondents were being pelted with urgent inquiries by their editors
and the entire press corps assailed poor Comrade Podolsky, fro
t&m director of the Press Department. Both the Soviet and the
Japanese Foreign Offices issued vigorous denials. Litvinov, in a
righteous rage, issued statements in Washington implying that
I had been used as cat’s-paw in a Japanese plot to wreck the recog-
nition negotiations. Tokyo, in a no less righteous rage, insisted that
I had been used as a cat’s-paw in a Soviet plot to help those nego-
tiations.

Meanwhile, the United Press clamored to know immediately
and specifically the sources of my information. My chief mistake
at that juncture, now that I can judge the affair in ample per-
spective, was probably in not disclosing those sources. But I was
convinced that any mention of Ivanov and Petrov would get them
shot. Even if they had acted under instructions in talking to me,
I felt, the Soviet government would be obliged to punish them
once their names became known. For the protection of the two
men, and with full knowledge that I was sacrificing myself for
their safety, I therefore asserted that I had obtained the reports
from “trustworthy foreign diplomatic sources, confirmed by well-
informed Russians-” Beyond this formula, I refused to commit
myself.

Angry, insistent, cajoling cables from the U.P. chiefs poured in
on me. London telephoned me continuously for hours and days.
Ignorant of the Moscow atmosphere, they could not understand
why I should withhold the names of my informants.

MY RECALL FROM MOSCOW 597

“At least,” Webb Miller in London pleaded, “at least tell us
off-record. We will agree not to publish the information.”

“Don’t you understand that there is nothing off -record here?”
I tried to explain. “We are being listened to at this very moment.
Anything I say or cable will be instantly known. I can’t reveal
any more without endangering Russian lives. Do what you wish
about it. I can’t say any more.”

The year that had begun for me with a threat of expulsion be-
cause of the Kuban story thus ended with a much worse offense.
Litvinov and Umansky in America made peremptory demands
that I be recalled. If I were not withdrawn peaceably, Litvinov
stormed, his first act on returning to Moscow would be to expel
me. For a while the United Press held out. In six years of report-
ing I had not let them down once 3 Bickel, Bender, and others
were convinced (as they told me later) that I had acted in good
faith and that my story was substantially correct. But in the end
they yielded. With the two countries entering a new era of diplo-
matic friendship, they could scarcely do less.

The fact that neither Ivanov nor Petrov was punished for his
indiscretion on a military matter gave color to the widespread sup-
position in Moscow that I had been hoaxed by the G.P.U. for
purposes of its own. The identity of everyone I had talked to
on the critical evening could scarcely have remained a secret to
the authorities. But such suppositions, however logical they might
sound, did not seem to me justification for seeking personal exon-
eration by endangering the lives of others.

The very day after I dictated the offending story, Ivanov visited
Zara Witkin at his lodgings. Aware of my difficult position, Zara
put the matter squarely to the Russian. He pointed out that both
the Moscow and Tokyo governments had denied his facts, and
the correspondent was caught between two fires.

“Naturally,” Ivanov said, apparently unperturbed, “official de-
nials in such cases are purely formal. They really confirm the
facts.”

Then he proceeded to give Zara even more specific military and
technical details of the Far Eastern episodes. When Zara reported
the conversation to me, he gave it as his solid conviction that my

598 REDEDICATION

dispatch was not only justified but probably a watered-down ver-
sion of the truth.

I hunted up Ivanov and Petrov. I explained to them that while
they had not given me explicit authority to use their information,
they had not warned me against using it. Their permission was
at least implicit. Now I was “in a pickle,” and so, I presumed, were
they. They seemed curiously placid about the whole affair.

“Everything we told you is true,” Ivanov said, “though I am
sorry you sent it abroad. But all the official rage is just make-
believe, and there is no cause to worry.”

A Russian acquaintance who had been for years in the G.P.U.
service in France and now resided in Leningrad came to see me.
He was fully informed on my troubles. Not only was my story
correct, he said, but it had actually appeared in certain Soviet
newspapers in the Far East, before the government ordered the
story suppressed. What is more, he had himself seen the pub-
lished account in the Leningrad library and volunteered to clip
it for me. He was leaving for Leningrad next day and when he
returned he would have the documentary proof of the airplane
and naval incidents for me.

At the railroad station next day, just before the Leningrad train
pulled out, this fellow was arrested — his wife brought me the news
—and he was not released until after I left Russia several months
later.

Ed L. Keen, Vice-President of the United Press in charge of
Europe, apprised me that he was coming to Moscow. He had been
instructed by New York to break the news of my recall to me
personally so as to soften the shock. I looked up Ivanov.

“Keen will be here in a day or two,” I said. “He is doubtless
coming to make a personal check-up on this whole mess.”

“That’s fine,” Ivanov smiled. “I shall be glad to meet him
and to confirm all the facts. You might as well know that I have
seen the G.P-U. archive on the matter. There are many clippings
from our own Far Eastern papers that tell the story exactly as
I have told it to you.”

When Keen arrived, I tried in vain to find Ivanov. During all
the time Keen was in Moscow, Ivanov was in hiding. When I
ran into him again weeks later he looked at me apologetically
and shrugged his shoulders. There was no need for words. Higher

MY RECALL FROM MOSCOW 599

authorities had evidently decided to let me “hold the bag.” In a
hundred ways I attempted in the following months to lay hands
on tangible proofs of the story, the essential correctness of which
I have never doubted. At every turn I was frustrated.

I remained in Moscow eight or nine weeks longer, to tie up
loose ends in my personal affairs, and particularly to dispose of
my newly built and as yet unoccupied apartment. That apartment
represented practically everything I had managed to save in my
six years in Moscow $ in terms of cash I would be starting from
scratch when I returned home — scratch is a well-worn groove for
all newspapermen.

Officially, no one let on that I had been recalled at Litvinov’s
angry insistence. I had made no secret of my plans to give up
the Moscow post soon, even before the recall took the initiative
out of my hands. Before I left, the Press Department gave an
official luncheon in my honor and we parted on a basis of polite
if strained cordiality.

II. Farewell to Russia!

A YOUNG Russian whom I had not seen for more than three
years came to me one day in great agitation. His overcoat collar
and a thick woolen scarf hid his face; not until he was sure I was
alone in my office did he reveal himself.

“In coming here I am risking my life,” he said. “If they find
out that I have told you what I’m going to tell you, my life isn’t
worth this . . .” and he snapped his fingers.

I knew who “they” were. Even a pronoun referring to the
G.P.U. is electric with terror on a Russian tongue.

“But I am here because I love you” — Russians use words like
love more easily than Americans — “and because I believe you are
an honest man. I want to warn you to be careful— and to get out
of Russia as soon as you can. Don’t ask me how I know. But I
do know. I heard ‘them’ discuss you. They’re cooking up a frame-
up on you. They’re afraid of what you’ll say when you get back
to America.”

“What sort of a frame-up?” I asked.

“I don’t know. All I know is that they are determined to dis-
credit you. What bothers them is that you’re leaving with a clean
record. One of them said that they’d tried to draw you in five
years ago, soon after you came to our country, but that you refused
to see them.”

“Well, what in the world can I do about it? I can’t possibly
leave for another month or more. I have about three thousand
dollars invested in an apartment I bought from the Writers’ Hous-
ing Cooperative. I must at least rent it to someone before I clear
out.”

The Russian shrugged his shoulders, in genuine distress.

“My only thought was that if you knew, you would be more
careful,” he said. “The only advice I have is that you should
suspect everyone and trust no one, not even your best Russian
friends. They’ve had to report on you like we all report on for-

600

FAREWELL TO RUSSIA! 6oi

eigners, and they may be forced to try to get you involved in
trouble. Be careful. Don’t commit yourself on anything. Above
all, don’t sign anything.”

He got up, kissed me warmly on both cheeks, Russian fashion,
and put up his collar again. At the door he paused.

“And, dear Gene, only one thing I ask of you. That will be my
reward for risking my neck by warning you. When you are out
in the free world — tell the truth about Russia — tell them what we
would tell if we dared.”

He peeped out into the corridor. The coast was clear, and he
hurried away.

That this Russian was close enough to the G.P.U. to overhear
secrets of the sort he conveyed to me was not a surprise. Long ago
I had ceased being surprised to learn that gentle, inoffensive
people were inveigled into the network of spying. I pretended
not to be aware that men and women whom I saw frequently were
“reporting” on me. I bore them no ill will, knowing that they had
been forced into the service and hated it.

Once after a Russian acquaintance left me I found a piece
of paper he had dropped accidentally. On it were notations all
too clearly intended for the G.P.U. For a minute I smiled at
the idea of returning it to him and watching his discomfiture. Then
pity for the man and his compulsory avocation overcame me. I de-
stroyed the scrap of paper and never mentioned it to him.

There was one occasion when the chauffeur of a borrowed
car stopped a good two blocks from the address I had given him.
He blushed with embarrassment.

“Mr. Lyons,” he said, “do you mind dismissing me here and
walking? I don’t want to know where you are going.”

“But I’m only going to see a dentist,” I laughed.

“Oh, in that case . . and he stepped on the gas.

Espionage and surveillance were the element in which we lived,
part of the air we breathed. In the first years I continued to be
surprised when Russians inadvertently showed familiarity with
some phase of my private affairs that they could know only by
eavesdropping on my conversation or mail, but in the end this
experience became too commonplace. A show-off streak in his char-
acter led one Russian to mention casually intimate details of my

REDEDICATION

602

own or Billy’s activities, watching us slyly for the inevitable ex-
pression of astonishment.

That sort of thing, in any event, helped to keep one on the
straight and narrow path. We lived under floodlights in glass
houses equipped with loud speakers. . . .

Whether the warning I had received was justified or not, I
shall never know. The fact that I was thoroughly alarmed is
scarcely an index of a guilty conscience. I had seen too many demon-
stration trials to dismiss the Soviet frame-up artists lightly. The
agent provocateur has been an instrument of Russian statecraft for
centuries. I became tight-lipped and circumspect with all my Rus-
sian acquaintances, an abrupt change in my free-and-easy attitude
which must have seemed inexplicable to them. Only one incident
may have had a direct relation to the dramatic warning. The same
“Petrov” who helped embroil me in the unfortunate Japanese
airplane story telephoned one afternoon to invite me urgently
to his home.

“But I’m terribly busy,” I apologized 5 “why not make it some
other day?”

“Because I have a friend here, who’s eager to meet you . . .
a very important person ”

“In that case, I certainly am too busy to come.”

“All right, Gene, I’ll be frank with you. You are leaving the
country soon. Why shouldn’t we separate as friends? You can help
us — and we can help you.”

“Well, you tell your friend, no matter how important he is,
that there is nothing he can do for me, and even less I can do for
him.”

I never heard about the matter again. But several friends
talked to me in terms too parallel to have been quite accidental.
They sought to impress upon me the wisdom of silence. One put
his plea on a personal basis 3 anything derogatory that I might write
would reflect on the “loyalty” of those who were close to me. A
Russian newspaperman put the argument on a professional foot-
ing:

“After all you can’t afford to make an enemy of our govern-
ment,” he said. “You will undoubtedly remain in journalism. A
war is coming. Think what it will mean to your career to be able

FAREWELL TO RUSSIA! 603

to cover the war from the Soviet lines, with your knowledge of
Russian and your experiences here!”

Day after day, the counsel of silence was pressed on me in
almost the same words. I no longer doubted that it was an inspired
campaign. The appeal to professional cupidity did not touch me:
I was too seriously compromised in the Kremlin’s eyes to recon-
quer a “friendly” label by keeping my mouth closed. The danger
of embarrassing the scores of Russians with whom I had associated
in the course of six years, on the other hand, did impress me.
It was to be the most effective curb on my candor. Even in these un-
inhibited pages it has served as a brake on eloquence.

2

Parting with a beloved city is like parting with a beloved
friend; in the sentiment of separation one forgives much and
idealizes much. My experience had been sufficiently galling. It
is not pleasant to feel your hope changing inexorably into despair.
But at least I had lived on a high emotional level; Moscow would
be forever associated for me with heights and depths. Those who
dwell on a humdrum level of apathy and intellectual comfort can
never know that it is the intensity of the years, not their quality
of pleasure, that makes them precious. The thought that I might
have remained an ignorant confederate in the horrors I witnessed
is frightening. Distressing as my experience has been, I treasure it.

The knowledge that I was leaving Moscow, perhaps forever,
made me look at the city and its people with a sharper vision.
Things were suddenly focused more clearly, and I allowed the
image to soak into my consciousness. In the outer chambers of my
mind I was pleased, on the whole, by the impending change. But
at its core I felt already premonitory twinges of homesickness. I
knew for a certainty that I should never again touch Russian
music, Russian pictures, Russian memories, without a gnawing
nostalgic pain.

I have no need to reconcile my detestation of the soul of Bol-
shevism — its cruel, morbid, jesuitical soul — with my affection for
Russia and the Russians. People who hated the pogrom-mongering
tsarist autocracy, too, often found it possible to love Russia, some-
times impossible not to love it. Much of my resentment against

REDEDICATION

604

the organized brutality that I witnessed derived, as a matter of
fact, from my affection for the Russians. More and more with
every passing year, I had identified myself psychologically with
them. I rejected the assumption underlying the condescending
“objectivity” of certain foreign observers that the Russians are
a peculiar breed set aside by destiny for sacrificial rites and labora-
tory experimentation. To this day, nothing riles me more than the
placid acceptance of Russian “sacrifices” by comfortable “friends of
Soviet Russia” in the spirit of vivisectionists.

I was parting from Moscow in its huddled, mysterious winter
embodiment, precisely as I had first made its acquaintance. It was
a white city of brief days and long enshrouding nights, whose life
was hidden away deep within its many garments of fear and in-
trigue. In every city there is a world below the surface, beyond
the reach of the five senses 5 anyone who has sought to know more
intimately New York or London, Paris or Rome, has become
aware of this elusive nether reality. But in Moscow the secret
seems more profoundly buried. The absence of a free press, the
all-powerful secret service, the outlawry of all independent
thoughts and feelings, the tom-tom monotony of surface slogans
— all these things that have been the country’s portion for a thou-
sand years seem to have driven the Russian people underground:
their essential life seems subterranean, a life of secret thoughts,
unspoken hopes, vague dreads, clandestine satisfactions.

If this sounds mystical the fault is with my lack of skill in ex-
pressing the idea. It is a real, almost a physical essence to which I
refer. Every Russian man and woman lives automatically a double
existence, has lived it for numberless generations: one public and
obviously conformist, the other private and un trammeled. For a
moment, in the throes of revolution, the inner existence broke
through the surface restraints — then it was driven back to its lair.
The fissures have now been completely filled and sealed and the
outer life is again policed by the ancient threats and compulsions.

These people whom I was leaving behind — my heart reached
out to them in sympathy. Some were pariahs, hiding in corners,
disguising their voices and their faces. Others were adjusted to
the new system, but living in continuous dread of a new persecu-
tion. The mass of workers had had a moment of intoxicating
glory, when they marched and shouted and waved flags and felt

FAREWELL TO RUSSIA! 605

themselves masters. Now they were under the heel of arbitrary
power again, terrified by teeming threats: loss of bread ration,
loss of passport, loss of their squalid “living space.” The peasants
— still the great majority in the nation — had won their land only
to lose it again; were being chastised with flaming sword for pre-
ferring their instinctive way of life; felt themselves in their frus-
tration indentured laborers slaving for absentee landlords in the
Kremlin. Every liquidation disclosed another class needing to
be liquidated, and the flaming sword was being whetted on the
prostrate body of the Russian population. At the top, new privi-
leged classes had emerged, with power of life and death over
their fellows, using that power with the ferocity of cynical in-
difference or the more dreadful ferocity of fanaticism; a parvenu
aristocracy based on raw and naked power.

Above all, I had the sense of leaving behind me a nation
{raffed. Trapped physically, with bloodhounds and machineguns
and death sentences guarding the frontiers to prevent people from
escaping, with a passport system to prevent them from moving
freely inside the frontiers, with endless ukases and threats to regu-
late their existence. Trapped intellectually, with every thought
prescribed and mental curiosity punished as heresy; the new literacy
seemed an additional taunt, sharpening the appetite while deny-
ing it sustenance. Trapped spiritually, through the need of pretend-
ing enthusiasm for the knout, genuflecting to hateful images and
practicing hypocrisy as the first law of survival. In the past, the
word freedom had been whispered in secret caves, but now punish-
ment was too swift and too deadly. There was no longer even the
solace of martyrdom for the defiant; a technique had been evolved
for breaking their spirit and dragging them into the limelight for
slobbering confessions of guilt.

The fact that these things had come to pass under the banners
of “socialism” only made them more ghastly. The word socialism,
the eternal dream of equality and justice, was also trapped.

The parting was not “such sweet sorrow.” It was tinctured with
gall. For months, I had been planning to leave, and I was vexed
tha t re call should have come before resignation. Ever since I
was threatened with expulsion early in the year, I knew that my
tenure was highly uncertain; the Kremlin would use the first

REDEDICATION

606

plausible alibi for ridding itself of my comment on its affairs. It
was not astonishing that a dispatch which would have been con-
doned in a “friendly 35 correspondent should be turned instantly
into a jack for prying me out of my journalistic post. The Soviet
objection clearly was not to this one dispatch but to the whole
tenor of my reporting. I was mortified, therefore, that I had en-
abled Litvinov and Umansky to convert what was a divergence
in principle into a petty squabble over the authenticity of one story
among the thousands I had written.

I was saddened, too, by this parting on a note of rancor. The
memory of the exalted mood of consecration to a cause in which
I began my assignment in the Russian Utopia was still fresh in
my mind. The collapse of the mood, the slow crumbling of the as-
sumptions on which it had fed, was a personal tragedy. From the
wreckage I was desperately anxious to save my basic emotional in-
vestment: the faith that a juster and happier world was worth
fighting for. For the world, too, the tragedy of the Russian
debacle is that it may impugn the value of all social striving; that
by mocking ideals it threatens idealism as such with bankruptcy.

I felt that the Russian revolution has a symbolic validity which
not all its horrors can extinguish. It marks a high moment on the
plains of time, a moment of release and challenge and daring.
Whatever its course inside Russia, it signalized the end of the
divine rights of capital even as the French revolution, which also
degenerated into a new despotism in its own day, signalized the
end of the divine rights of kings. The original ideals of the Rus-
sian revolution are in the stream of human thought: not a million
Stalins and G.P.U.’s can change that. Increasingly, I am con-
vinced, they will become the unquestioned axioms of mankind’s
thinking, regardless of their fate in any one country, precisely as
the philosophical concepts of the French revolution became
axiomatic for the civilized world in the Nineteenth Century. What
happened in Russia twenty years ago will remain a frontier in
time, token of the deepening twilight of the capitalist era.

The Russian revolution gave wings to earthbound hopes. My
problem, the moral and intellectual problem of millions who know
that the revolution has been betrayed and perverted, was to dis-
own the perversions without clipping those wings.

FAREWELL TO RUSSIA!

607

3

The last day of January, 1934, my last day in Moscow, re-
mains in my memory with a peculiarly sharp-edged vividness. A
day of gray light filtering through wet snow, of farewells that
seemed as final as death, of pathetic farce and tragic episode.

My family had left for Berlin about a week earlier. My per-
sonal belongings had been shipped off. Only the debris of a long
residence remained: odds and ends too trivial or decrepit to be
given away. A fantastic competition for these leavings developed
that day. People who came to say good-by and were genuinely
grieved by my departure, nevertheless eyed a discarded pair of
shoes or a chipped cup covetously. I gave them carte blanche to
help themselves, a little ashamed of the poverty which made
people so tremulously acquisitive at an almost solemn moment.
Then I discovered that my generosity was working havoc with
Shura’s temper. As our housemaid and cook for so many years
she considered herself justifiably the heiress presumptive to all
left -over property!

A well-known Russian cornered me for a last-minute appeal to
hold my peace when I emerged from his country; and if I must
talk, at least never to mention his famous name.

Nathalie’s last chore as my secretary was to wrench from Glav-
lit, the literary censorship office, the delayed permit for my notes,
clippings and other materials; no written words may leave the
country without that bureau’s authority.

Long and weary months of waiting were about to bring the
Moscow Daily News their reward. Borodin and his lieutenants
had looked hungrily at the space occupied by the United Press
and its correspondent. They regarded my going as a divine de-
liverance and scrupled not to show their jubilation. But their joy
was not undiluted by apprehensions. What if my successor, or
some other influential foreigner, seized the coveted area, what, in-
deed? But not while the mind that directed an epochal revolution
in China, a revolution whose echoes will thunder down the ages,
was still capable of strategy! Generalissimo Borodin stationed
guards in the corridors, and even the limping old doorman was
mobilized, all under instructions to apprise the commander-in-chief

REDEDICATION

608

as soon as an enemy was sighted. The arrival of a large suitcase
nearly precipitated hostilities, until I explained that I was taking
it with me to Europe and that it did not foreshadow a new tenant.

And everywhere that last morning the city’s life was disrupted.
Unexpected orders had come through for a “spontaneous” mass
parade in the afternoon, so that work in offices was all but sus-
pended. The endless formalities incident to leaving the country,
many of them postponed to the last day, were therefore snarled in
alibis. Papers, tickets, permits, were in the end obtained only by
heroically hacking through the wild disorder. Every messenger re-
turned with a tale of procrastination, elusive functionaries, and
helpless apology. A parade and routine business were not miscible.

“But what’s the parade about?” I asked.

Semichasov, my chauffeur, thought he knew. It was, he opined,
in honor of the brave airmen who had gone up in a stratosphere
balloon the previous day. The morning’s papers headlined the fact
that they had set a new world’s record in altitude, surpassing the
record established by a previous balloon earlier in the year. Others
made the same surmise. But few people seemed to know specifically
what triumph was to be celebrated, what sudden and spontaneous
sentiment was to be demonstrated. . . .

It was not, alas! , the stratosphere flight. The foreign correspond-
ents, like a few others in Moscow, knew of the gruesome tragedy
in which the record-making flight had ended. Having reached
and reported an unprecedented height, the balloon’s radio suddenly
went dead. Hours later the spherical, gaily painted gondola and
the shattered bodies of its occupants were found. The facts were
already spread on the front pages of the outside world — but they
were being concealed from the Soviet people in order not to
dampen the spirit of the parade. In reporting the flight and hiding
its catastrophic climax, the Soviet press was deliberately lying to
its readers. As always, “news” was doled out to the people like
bread rations, or suppressed altogether in the interests of the higher
truth.

By the time the parade got under way, of course, the marchers
knew that they were displaying their unbounded enthusiasm for
the Party conference in progress at the former Nobles’ Club. The
prepared banners were clangorous with panegyrics of Stalin and
his Party and his Central Committee and his unmatched genius.

FAREWELL TO RUSSIA!

609

I had seen parades in these years that had in them the throb and
the lift of holiday. But this, my last parade in Russia, was a funereal
and leaden- footed thing: weary men and women by the hundred
thousand dragging their own weight under soggy banners for hours
through a gloomy dusk.

Even before the hall door was closed, I saw Borodin’s stalwarts
rushing to take possession of the rooms we had occupied. Great
tears rolled down Shura’s chapped cheeks as I shook her calloused
hand. Timidly she had given me a parting gift: a large lacquered
Palekh box with the picture of a Ukrainian peasant girl on the
cover. I remember wondering through all the excitement how
such a thing had come to her, since it could be bought only at
Torgsin for valuta ; two years later, reading E. E. Cummings’
book on Russia, I learned in its pages that he had presented it to
her.

The entire press corps and a batch of diplomats were at the
Alexandrovsky railroad station to see me off. This mass turn-out
for foreigners going “out” is a Moscow tradition. A few more in-
timate Russian friends were there, timidly keeping their distance
from the untouchable foreigners. Two or three of them wept
softly. Several who said they would be at the station obviously
could not muster the courage for such a public demonstration of
their friendship with a foreigner.

At the moment when the train begins to pull out of Moscow,
one feels more sharply than ever the great gulf between Russia
and the surrounding world. Could it really be that this train
touches an incredible world where people speak their minds,
where bread is plentiful; a world without G.P.U.’s and Piatiletkas
and food queues and censorship? The newspapermen, the diplomats
knew how flimsy is that freedom, how uneven that plenitude.
But for Russians, to whom a trip across the frontier is as fantasti-
cally impossible as a trip to the moon, the forbidden world glowed
with the rainbow colors of their dreams.

Farewell to Moscow! Farewell to the city of desperations and
enthusiasms, beauty and squalor. The thought that I might never
see it again was a vise, every turn of the train wheels closing
its arms more painfully on my heart.

III. A Tour of Tyrannies

BEFORE returning to the United States, I spent several months
(February-April, 1934) in intensive travel and investigation on the
European continent, in the stimulating company of Zara Witkin.
An assignment from Cosmopolitan Magazine for several politi-
cal articles gave my trip a purposive cohesion which a random
tour cannot have. But I really needed no such external discipline.
I was impelled by a harsh inner drive that fixed the direction of
my journey and, even more so, the direction of my thought. In a
sense I was still exploring Russia.

The questions plowed up in my consciousness by the Soviet ex-
perience pursued me through Germany and Austria, Italy and
Spain, clamoring for clear and honest answers. They howled
down every attempt at pettifogging. Equivocation and compromise
might do the trick for strangers: you balanced the brutalities of
the G.P.U. against those of the Gestapo; you wrote off the valuta
tortures by reference to anti-Semitism in Poland and Germany;
you let the horrors of the destruction of Vienna tenements cancel
out the horrors of liquidation. But in the secret mind where a
man must live with himself, you rejected this spurious bookkeep-
ing. You were obliged to total up the iniquities instead of check-
ing them off against one another.

In Germany, the hectic inhumanities of the first months were
settling down to more routine cruelties. In Vienna, we saw the
Social-Democratic workers trapped and killed in their communal
houses by bravos who called themselves Christian Socialists: as
cynical an insult to the name of Christ — and the name of social-
ism — as has ever been perpetrated. Poland squirmed under the
camouflaged dictatorship of Marshal Pilsudski, jammed in be-
tween Hitlerism and Stalinism. In Italy, we were weighed down
by the quiet as of a vast prison in which force and fear are the
keepers. The Spanish people looked down shudderingly into an
abyss of civil war. In Switzerland and France, where democratic

6lO

A TOUR OF TYRANNIES 6ll

government still held on with bleeding fingers, totalitarian insani-
ties were being shouted from both Right and Left.

Everywhere we saw hordes of the outlawed and declassed cower
in corners. Ordinary conversation was sunk to a whisper. The
fumes of prejudice, distrust and desperation hung over Europe
in thick fogs. Everywhere sadistic minorities, disciplined under
an arbitrary autocrat, working their will upon the patient, suf-
fering, inarticulate masses. Everywhere — and that is what im-
pressed us most, exploring Russia beyond its own frontiers — the
autocrats using almost the identical slogans, wielding the self-
same “sword of history” for class or race or nation.

Everywhere independent thinking was called unpatriotic, coun-
terrevolutionary, heretical, and a new generation was being reared
to believe that it was inheriting a monopoly of ultimate truth be-
yond the need for reason. War was being idealized again — the
terrors of the last war carefully concealed from those who must
fight the next one. Just twenty years after a holocaust swept the
world, devouring a generation of men and laying waste entire
nations, charring the earth and littering the floor of the seas with
corpses of men and their ships, Europe was once again arming to
its teeth. The stench of scorched flesh was still in the air, and
already nations were jockeying for position in a struggle that no-
body wanted and everybody expected.

Isolated scenes, like so many snapshots, remain in my mind:

A lanky, nervous individual, with a wisp of brown tobacco-
stained beard and a pained smile full of black teeth, talked to us
in a Warsaw cafe. My knowledge that he carried terrible war
wounds was an overtone to his earnest voice.

“We’re the Belgium of Eastern Europe,” he was saying. “No
matter who fights whom, we Poles get caught in between. We’ve
got the Nazis on one side and the Bolsheviks on the other —
nice little Polish sandwich, eh? Can you imagine us inviting Com-
rade Budenny’s armies onto Polish soil? They’d never get out
again. And if Germans ever enter, as friends or foes, there’s just
as little chance of their leaving again.”

As he spoke, the enormous military display in his country began
to make sense. Abundant gold braid 5 droves of long-waisted of-
ficers, a touch of the operatic in their elegance — signs not of strength

REDEDICATION

6l2

but of fear. And other fears, minor patterns on the main design,
came into view. A young newspaperman joined us, red-haired, ex-
citable, Semitic. He was lambasting the extreme Rights.

“A monarchist party without a candidate for monarch!” he
shouted. “They are just envious of Hitler and aching for some
juicy pogroms of their own.”

“There you have it,” the Polish friend who had introduced us
to these people made the resume. “There you have it. Pszemitsky
is afraid of the Bolos. Guterman is afraid of anti-Semitic outbreaks.
This fellow is scared of the Nazis. All of us are afraid of war
and trouble and sure they’re coming, plenty of it. As long as the
cussing colonel — Pilsudski, I mean — sits on the lid there is some
hope. But when he’s gone, God help Poland! Oh, well, there’s a
new Mickey Mouse playing today, which is something in a con-
fused world.”

Berlin and Hamburg reverberated with atrocity stories. The Ger-
man husband of a lovely Jewish woman of our acquaintance was
taken off a train in the provinces and beaten to a pulp. A Jewish
boy of eleven came home weeping bitterly while we drank tea
one day with his parents ; all his life he had played in the neigh-
borhood park, but today the Gentile boys, his own friends, chased
him off the soccer field. All the Nazi arguments — and they were
retailed to me for hours by otherwise normal Germans — shriv-
eled to nothing in the heat of one child’s outraged soul.

A former Social-Democratic Deputy consented to meet us in a
cafe on the Kurfuerstendam 5 and one of the world’s greatest archi-
tects, outlawed because of his modernistic style, though he was as
Aryan as Streicher racially, received us in his home. After Mos-
cow, these men seemed to us startlingly daring. Political outlaws
under the hammer and sickle would never have dared meet for-
eign investigators so openly. But these were differences in the
age and temper of the two dictatorships, rather than differences in
kind.

“They’re putting gables on all the fine houses I have built,”
the architect smiled wryly. “Flat roofs are taboo — Judaeo-Bol-
shevik roofs these maniacs call them . . .”

Outside the G restaurant, Berlin was caught up in an emo-

tional frenzy. Parades, harangues, ballyhoo, Heil Hitler! Brown

A TOUR OF TYRANNIES 6 I 3

uniforms, black uniforms, the staccato of marching men and the
eternal rattle of collection boxes. But inside this restaurant there
was an oppressive quiet. The enveloping excitement seemed to
make the silence here slightly unreal, like an exaggerated set on a
modernist stage. A little like a homey dugout with war raging
all around — an illusory quiet and safety. To a foreigner the people
in this place looked like some more Germans. But the Germans
had disowned them. They were men and women without a coun-
try: German Jews.

It was a tangible presence— their common disaster. Nearly all
of them, if asked, would describe themselves as patriotic Germans.
They know no other Vaterland . Many of them are devout Chris-
tians. Now they all huddled together, for human warmth, for
fear of humiliation in other places. Already they were in a psycho-
logical ghetto, ringed by walls of insult, hatred, discrimination
more confining than the physical walls that ringed the ghettos of
their ancestors in the Middle Ages.

A gawky, sandy-haired lad in brown uniform, awkward in his
shirt sleeves, with a swastika on his arm, entered the restaurant.
He rattled a collection box, apparently unaware that he had in-
truded on a Jewish corner. An embarrassed hush fell on the place
as the boy went from table to table. A few sheepishly dropped
some coins into his box. The others bent their heads over their
plates in sudden concentration. I saw face muscles twitch.

The communal tenements for workers built by a socialist gov-
ernment in Vienna were celebrated around the world as an ex-
ample of what enlightened cooperation could achieve. Zara had
often spoken of visiting the Austrian capital especially to see these
blocks of houses. And now, at last, he was seeing them — as a sham-
bles of brick and mortar and human flesh. In many places we had
no need for doors, but walked through the shellholes in walls
made by Christian Socialist artillery.

We reached the city on the last day of fighting. I rushed to the
scene with some of the American correspondents and wrote a
piece about what I saw: the last thing I did for the United
Press. Soldiers still patrolled the area and machineguns were
trained on the battered houses. There were few men in the tene-
ments, but many women and children wandered through the ruins

REDEDICATION

614

like ghosts in search of bodies. In a kindergarten we saw toys
and picture books in a congealed pool of black blood. On one of
the house-fronts a sculptured figure of Peace had escaped injury
and presided ludicrously over the wreckage.

Through a shellhole we stepped into the remains of a kitchen.
Its windows were a tangle of splintered wood and metal. The op-
posite wall was mostly a great ragged wound. And there, in the
debris, in this room without walls or windows, an old woman
was sitting close to the cold stove, gnarled hands clasped in
her lap. It was grotesque, the woman sitting there so still, as
though waiting for company, in the ruin of a kitchen. A half-
eaten meal, clearly several days old, was on the table.

“What are you waiting for?” I asked, more to cover my em-
barrassment over the intrusion than to elicit information.

She did not answer, only seemed to shrink more deeply into
her crumpled garments. Her eyes were staring and lusterless. Sud-
denly she spoke:

“I am not waiting. I am home. This is the only home I have.”

Had the word “home” ever been applied more inappropriately?
Nothing had been touched since the bombardment. Broken glass
and plaster lay around in heaps. To our surprise the woman spoke
again, as if to herself rather than to her uninvited visitors.

“I was in the cellar when the shooting went on,” she said.
“So was Frau Mueller and the Platkin children, all of us. Karl
was killed the first day. Karl is my husband. They wouldn’t let
me look at him. He was so horribly broken. But at night I went
up. I made supper for my sons. They made me go down again.
I knew I should have stayed — look, they never finished supper.”

“Where are your sons now?”

“How should I know? Maybe dead, or arrested, or hiding.”

She shrugged and forgot us. We tiptoed out, feeling guilty.
Ashamed for the human race.

After the fighting, it was good to be back in the Ring, the inner
core of Vienna, where life went on as usual. The city of Gamut-
lichkeit . The Blue Dcmube. Strauss. The charm of Vienna’s cafe
life. Over the coffee cups and their little mounds of whipped
cream I heard details of that day’s executions. One man con-
demned by the court-martial was horribly wounded, but he was
dragged from a hospital cot to the gallows.

A TOUR OF TYRANNIES 6 I 5

In the next days I listened to the diminutive Chancellor Doll-
fuss, and to the robust Prince von Starhemberg. They both talked
of God. They both had divine sanction for wrecking the life of
the old woman sitting by a cold stove in a home without walls
or windows.

As we stepped off the train in Zurich in the evening, we heard
shooting somewhere beyond the station. My nerves still taut after
the days of blood-letting in Vienna, I jumped to conclusions.
Another revolution! A man-sized riot at the least. I felt a bit
flattered by the way the gods were apparently timing affairs to
my journalistic convenience.

We rushed to the street, only to find that the shooting came
from the park, where colored fireworks were being exploded.
Zurich was celebrating carnival that night. The main street was
ankle-deep in confetti. Masked women tickled us with feather
dusters and tooted horns in our ears. After the shambles in Austria,
I could not adjust myself at once to the loud, friendly holiday
mood here. I could not drive from my mind’s eye the sights of
death and ruin. Vienna was real — it was this city of fireworks and
confetti and carnival spirits that must be askew. How could both
be real on the same planet, a few hours’ distance from one an-
other?

An American functionary working for the League of Nations
conducted us through the building in Geneva. An ominously clean,
quiet, somnolent place. He pointed with pride to the efficient sys-
tem for distributing documents to affiliated governments, and to
the tall shiny files everywhere. Geneva itself is a spick-and-span
file where conferences are stuck away one after another — and for-
gotten.

Unconsciously we talked in whispers, as people do in a cemetery.
He told us how the League was making progress in the matters
of opium and white slavery and succeeding in minor things. Only
in its larger objectives it was failing. Germany and Japan were
out, but the League was still patronized by the authors of uni-
versal calendars and the like — there are special files for every
variety of crank, our guide boasted. There is an international mind,

6l6 REDEDICATION

he reassured us, and the League may still be the rallying point
for peace forces.

And then he added seriously: “At the moment, of course, it’s
as flat as a pancake.”

The Italian fascists have a corner on swagger. Trumpeters tore
down the streets of Rome on motorcycles blowing shrill triumph.
Announcing some fascist victory? Summoning all good patriots
to the colors? Not at all. Merely the advance guard of a Sunday
morning bicycle outing of the Fascist Youth. In Italy, officers
toss the ends of their capes with the gestures of toreadors defying
bulls. Revolver holsters slap sleek hips in rhythm to a strut. The
very infants and toddlers are decked out in black uniforms with
meters of white braid like old-fashioned curtain cords.

The gangling, aristocratic-looking Angelina, whom I knew from
San Remo sojourns, was an enthusiastic fascist. She volunteered to
act as our guide. A dofolavora headquarters, strangely like the
workers’ clubs in Moscow. A model dispensary, and a lecture on
social hygiene; medical help gratis for all citizens. A model chil-
dren’s home. “The fascist regime,” Angelina explained, “looks
first of all to its new generation.” Statistics on the successful fight
against illiteracy. I whispered to my companion, “At least the
weather is different from Moscow.”

Barcelona and Madrid were immeasurably charming; to the
untrained eye a life mellowed by time, crusted with tradition. But
under their picturesqueness we found a social tension, a tremulous
expectancy. Spain was a country walking a tight rope. Count
Romanones, many times Premier, led us through his musty palace,
filled with works of art — mostly paintings of grandee ancestors.
Alone among the aristocrats he had dared to speak up in the Cortes
for the ousted monarchs. A broad, stunted man, limping through
the gloomy place, all his features oversized and a little disordered,
he seemed a caricature of the mcien regime.

“This is a lull. The revolution in Spain did not end with the
expulsion of the Bourbons,” he said. “They’ve started something
they won’t be able to stop.”

Largo Caballero, the head of the socialist and trade-union
movements, likewise prophesied civil strife. He was a large, quiet,

A TOUR OF TYRANNIES 6lJ

stolid-looking person ; there was something incongruous between
the calm of his appearance and the impending violence of which
he spoke to me. The civil war, to him, was not a possibility but
an unavoidable fact.

The same assurance of disaster was voiced to me next day by
young Primo de Rivera, son of the former dictator. A slim, hand-
some young man, gentle in speech and manner, only the accident
of his name placed him in a role of leadership in the fascist camp.
Two years later he was to die at the hands of the Loyalists.

“You see,” an old Parisian explained, “the asphalting of our
streets has struck a serious blow to social revolution. How is one
to build barricades without cobblestones? Two months ago, in the
February fighting, though, our resourcefulness was vindicated.
Despite the width of our new streets and despite the absence of the
romantic cobblestones, we did raise barricades. Oh, yes, it was a
sort of dress rehearsal for what is still to come. Do not be mis-
led by the calm exterior, my friend. It is class against class, and
next time it may be a show-down. Who knows? This isn’t peace.
It’s an armed truce.”

Such was the atmosphere of Europe in the spring of 1934, such
were its moods of desperation. We searched for the glint of a
silver lining on the lowering clouds and found only the reflec-
tion of sharpened steel. The very word “revolution,” hallowed by
what happened in America in 1776, in France in 1789, in Russia
in 1917, had been commandeered by the reaction. Young de Rivera
and the blustering Starhemberg spoke of their “revolutions.” Nazis
baiting Jews and Christian Socialists bombarding workers’ homes
boasted of their “revolutions” and exterminated their “counter-
revolutionaries.” Instead of describing a break towards liberty,
the word had been distorted to cover a stampede back into the
Dark Ages.

2

We traveled especially to Switzerland to talk to Romain Rol-
land. As boys, both Zara and I had cut our spiritual teeth on Jem
Christofhe. For Zara in particular, the grand old man of European
letters towered above the moral landscape of his epoch as the

REDEDICATION

6 l8

champion of freedom, justice, the human spirit. We were too re-
cently from Russia and Germany to use such words, even in the
privacy of our thoughts, without a certain embarrassment. Such
ideas and ideals had lost intellectual caste, had been tarred and
feathered and made ridiculous. But in relation to Rolland there
were no other words. Our Jean Christophe had spoken up, often
alone, against the mass madness of war and the vengeance of the
victors.

Could he, knowingly, condone wholesale brutalities anywhere?
Was it possible that Jean Christophe had donned the uniform of
denominational partisanship and ruthless fanaticism? Could the
Rolland who wrote rhapsodically of Gandhi and the non-coopera-
tion movement consent knowingly to the extermination of millions
of Russian peasants as punishment for their passive Gandhi-like
resistance? To forced labor on an unprecedented scale? To the
world’s largest army of political prisoners? As far back as 1930,
I had been tragically let down by Romain Rolland’s refusal to
protest against the execution of the forty-eight food specialists.
The execution of thirty-five more only a year ago had again
failed to draw his lightning.

Perhaps, we thought, Jean Christophe had a magic explanation
for having joined the conspiracy of silence. . . . Zara wrote him
from Germany that two Americans, profoundly hurt by long
residence in the Soviet land, wished to talk to him frankly and
fully about their quandary, and he replied immediately inviting
us to visit him.

We found Rolland in his sunny retreat at Villeneuve, on Lake
Geneva. Tall, erect, in a blue suit of military cut and a high
clerical collar, a blanket over his frail shoulders, with a beauti-
fully chiseled face and bright, almost feverish, green-blue eyes,
Rolland measured up physically to our rather romanticized ex-
pectations. A priest without a church, in a religion of goodness
and justice without any ceremonial. Rolland was ill, he spoke in
a low, nervous voice, aflutter with a sort of passionate helpless-
ness.

We tried to speak of Russia. But Rolland would not listen.
Tremulously, in genuine panic, he shied away every time, switch-
ing the talk to Germany, France, the war and the peace. I stared
in unbelieving consternation — not in all my thirty-six years had

A TOUR OF TYRANNIES 619

I seen a clearer show of intellectual and moral diffidence. Here
were two earnest young men, reasonably intelligent, who had lived
and worked for many years in Russia — who were eager to save a
little of the faith they had brought with them to Russia. At the
very least, Rolland might have made some inquiries about condi-
tions in that country ; about the truth or falseness of the famine
reports, the direction in which that nation was tending and the
temper of its humanity. He asked nothing and looked distressed
each time Zara or I tried to drag the conversation back to Russia.

When we forced him to speak by point-blank questions, Rol-
land limited himself to a few threadbare formulas about the Soviet
Union’s hostile surroundings: the self-same formulas we had been
fed by Nazis and fascists and spokesmen for Dollfuss. “Russia,”
he said in a pained voice, “is in a state of war” — rubber-stamped
slogans clipped from communist editorials. But he neither said nor
asked anything about the Russian people on their farms, in their
factories, about the millions cutting timber in the North and dig-
ging canals in Central Asia. Jean Christophe was strangely dis-
interested in the Russian people and went off on a tangent when-
ever the talk threatened to touch those people.

His Soviet Russian wife, young, petite, attractive, was on the
alert to divert the discussion to safer channels whenever the
American visitors in meek bewilderment alluded to their Russian
years. Possibly I was mistaken — I hope I was — but the conviction
grew upon me that Rolland’s young wife was deliberately and in-
dustriously shielding him against an understanding of the Soviet
Union. In appraising that interview later, Zara and I were driven
to the unpleasant suspicion that Mme. Rolland, apparently an
ardent communist of the Stalinesque brand, was acting as a buffer
between the famous Frenchman and the infamous phases of Rus-
sian life. She felt, perhaps, that in guaranteeing his uncritical
friendship for the Kremlin she was making her contribution to
the cause. If our suspicion was uncharitable, part of the blame must
attach to the communist jesuitism we had seen in action in Mos-
cow. We knew too intimately that nothing, literally nothing, was
morally too devious to be embraced by the formula of the end
justifying all means. It may well be, of course, that the lady was
only trying to spare her husband the pain and bruises of a knowl-
edge of Rpssia.

REDEDICATION

620

“People say there is no artistic freedom in Russia,” Rolland
said in a quivering, almost pleading voice, “yet they publish my
writings in Moscow, though I am not a communist. They say
there is no personal freedom, yet I correspond with a Tolstoyan
in Russia. He writes me frankly about everything. . . .”

That was the nearest Rolland approached the subject all that
afternoon. The fathomless naivete of his plea left no room for
discussion. It bespoke a total and infantile ignorance of the politi-
cal pressures, the pervasive fears, the doctrinal obscurantism of
present-day Russia. The fact that some of his own works are
published in the U.S.S.R. veiled from his sight the multiple cen-
sorships, the continuous purgings of the arts, the muzzling of
scores of writers adjudged heretical. The “Tolstoyan” who wrote
him “frankly about everything” might have been a suicidal maniac
or someone assigned to the job by the higher authorities. The
personal freedom accorded to Tolstoyans has been sufficiently
described by the great writer’s daughter, Alexandra Tolstoy, after
she escaped from Russia.

Rolland was guarding a beautiful idealized vision of a Russia
that does not exist and shrank from anything that might mar its
lovely contours. It was the solace of his old age in a world that
was going mad. It was a blanket to warm his chilled spirit.

He must have sensed my disappointment at his failure to face
issues fearlessly. As we were parting toward dusk, he put his deli-
cate hand on my shoulder.

“I must fight the evil that is nearer and greater,” he said,
softly. “I am fighting Hitlerism. . . .”

It was not an explanation. It was an apology’ and I was un-
reasonably sorry for the old man. Jean Christophe, I said to my-
self, had capitulated. Jean Christophe was accepting the lesser
evil. Once, when he was younger and stronger, he would have re-
fused to compromise with evil on any terms. We left Yilleneuve
like men crushed. Romain Rolland had no magic explanation. He
lived by self-deception, like any American tourist buying a hand-
me-down religion from the Soviet travel bureau. A year later,
when Rolland visited Russia, and was feted and lionized, I watched
carefully for his statements. Unless the Soviet press misrepre-
sented him, he delivered himself of platitudinous eulogies of

A TOUR OF TYRANNIES 6zi

everything Soviet in the style of a Moscow Daily News interview
with a third-category tourist.

3

We had gone to Russia believing there were good dictatorships
and bad. We left convinced that defending one dictatorship is in
fact defending the principle of tyranny. As long as the Rollands
and G. B. Shaws and Barbusses condoned political murder and
mass exile and the crushing of human decencies in one place and
for one cause, they were supporting those methods in all places
and for all causes. Everything else was sophistry and deception.

The European journey strengthened that conviction. The an-
swers that 1 sought were implicit in the questions. The common
denominator in all that we saw, it seemed to me, was the decadence
of the moral sense in mankind, the attrition of ethical values. That
decadence showed itself in an indifference to suffering and a cal-
lous disrespect for the stuff of life. The moral collctfse of Eurofe
was far more terrible than its economic collafse. Until the World
War, even the narrowest philosophies of progress decked them-
selves in the feathers of humanism : greater freedom, happiness and
security for individual men and women, were the end-purposes
advanced by all leaders who dared hope for a following. Now
individual human beings were being degraded, brutalized, tor-
tured, and murdered for the glorification of some abstraction of
class or race. Whatever its pseudo-scientific justifications, every
specialized phobia was like the other in that it began by nullify-
ing the individual. Not one of them has room in its scheme of
salvation for individual liberties and happiness; for all of them
life is plentiful — and worthless.

It could not be claimed that the contempt for men and women
as such derives from the philosophy of Hitlerism or fascism or
communism, since that is their common element. Precisely the
reverse seemed to me the case : these philosophies all radiated from
that common center. Nor are they the last of its radiations; at this
very moment it is sprouting new ones in Spain, Austria, Japan,
China. To destroy any of these philosophies is futile, since the
disease that afflicts our epoch is at the core, in its repudiation of
those humanistic values nurtured through centuries. Until the dig-

REDEDICATION

622

nity of life, the importance of human happiness, a respect for
truth, and a horror of slavery under any guise are restored as mo-
tivating ideals if not as functioning realities, the economic or racial
or national Utopias will remain inhuman monstrosities.

Without these values, what is socialism but a society of regi-
mented slaves and regimented slave-drivers, in which private ex-
ploitation has been supplanted by public exploitation? Without
these values, what is to distinguish socialism according to Stalin
from socialism according to Mussolini as soon as Italy has na-
tionalized the last of its industries and turned the owners into re-
sponsible directors? What is the essential differentiation between
state socialism for Russia according to the Politburo and state so-
cialism for Germany according to the Nazis of the extreme Left?

I felt this increasingly the longer I lived in Russia. Every visit
to fascist countries, and the long “tour of tyrannies” that I under-
took after I left Russia, deepened that feeling. The “coming strug-
gle” — and it is not coming, it is already here — is not between
communism and fascism. It is the struggle for the moral and ethical
ideals which have been renounced by both those movements.

Once upon a time, socialism in any of its varieties was automati-
cally associated with the whole heritage of mankind in terms of
liberty and human dignity. Its chief argument against the economic
relations under capitalism was that they were incompatible with
that heritage. Socialization of the means of production was not an
end in itself, but only a means for making the higher end-purposes
of human progress possible. The socialist economy was regarded
only as the bare framework on which a free, democratic society
of equals would be built. Socialism, in short, was not merely an
economic formula but an ethical system of ideals.

The crime of Bolshevism is that it tore down the whole ethical
structure, retaining only the economic framework. Because it was
born in a land where the democratic and humanist ideals were
practically unknown, in a land still feudalistic in its thinking, Bol-
shevism merely adapted the mechanism of socialist economy to
its old slave psychology. The result was at best a sort of feudal
socialism.

As a boy on the East Side, as a man fighting the iniquities of
the society in which I lived, I was drawn to socialism by an out-
raged sense of justice. I have yet to meet anyone in the radical

A TOUR OF TYRANNIES 623

movement who was attracted to socialism in any o£ its versions
solely through the mind by the hard, cold logic of Marx or some
other “scientific” prophet. The first impulse was always emotional
— a search for justice or a reaction to injustice. It is the ethical
content of socialism that is accepted first, and its “scientific” logic
follows as a rationalization. Marx himself was a rebel against
the iniquities of the world long before he systematized his indig-
nations into a theory of historical development. Lenin was moved
to hatred of the society that killed his brother long before he trans-
lated that hatred into Bolshevik dogma.

That is why socialism emptied of its humanitarian impulses and
“prejudices” is not only barren but reactionary. It can advance
no argument which fascism cannot duplicate. Already it has brought
the idea of socialism into disrepute by cutting off all its associations
with the accumulated treasures of human freedom. A mechanistic,
dehumanized socialism based on dictatorship, systematic brutality,
regimented robots working for an impersonal state administered by
a privileged caste of bureaucrats has only the virtue that it is dif-
ferent from capitalism. But that is a virtue it shares with the so-
cial system of the African savages or feudalism in its pre-capitalist
forms. Those who defend such a socialism, no matter how noble
their motives, are essentially reactionary.

I left Russia and Europe convinced that the immediate task —
for those who have the urge to participate consciously in the his-
torical processes of their lifetime — is to defend the basic concepts
of freedom, humaneness, intellectual integrity, respect for life. The
triumph of any new economic system will be an empty victory,
a tragic retrogression, if these concepts are insulted and expunged
in the process. They must be defended from Bolshevik onslaughts
no less than fascist or capitalist onslaughts. If the certainty of a full
belly is to be made the only goal of socialism (and Russia, or any
other country, may attain that goal in time) then the inmates
of Sing Sing and Leavenworth Penitentiary are already living
under socialism.

IV. To Tell or Not to Tell

MY FAMILY had sailed for home while I prowled among the
European desperations. In April, I followed them, into an Amer-
ica of the New Deal, N.R.A., industry codes, brain trusts, legal
liquor. It was an America vastly different from the one I left
behind in 1931 ; the “rugged individualism” of which Secretary
Stimson had talked to me had become a vaudeville joke; the
state’s obligation to feed, clothe, and house its population was no
longer disputed.

But the differences were microscopic when measured on the scale
of social and moral distances separating our life from life in
Germany or Russia. The talk of New Deal regimentation sounded
absurd against my experience of totalitarian practices. Though I
had given many years to the defense of political prisoners and
civil liberties in America, I now found myself angered by glib
and offhand denunciations of American democracy by people who
could not even imagine what total annihilation of democratic
processes and civil rights meant.

In drawing up an indictment of American civilization, of its
racketeering profit system, its political corruptions, its pious hypocri-
sies, its shrieking contrasts of wealth and poverty, I could enter
competition with the Daily Worker . All the same, being back in
America gave me a sense of physical expansion. The tensions of
authoritarian Europe were suddenly released; the commonplace
freedoms of press, speech and assembly no longer seemed com-
monplace — like long-lost friends, I was excited to have them back
despite their obvious imperfections. And I was shocked by the
cavalier fashion in which certain Americans seemed ready to trade
in these hard-won rights for a mess of slogans. They needed to
be reminded, I felt, that these liberties, for all their limitations
and blemishes, were wrenched from unwilling masters and are
treasures to be guarded.

Mass meetings, picketing, minority newspapers, magazines of

62 4

TO TELL OR NOT TO TELL 625

protest, communists on the radio, unionization o£ workers — the
mere scope for open struggle, for free discussion, for public in-
dignations was intoxicating in my first year or two of America.
Before Russia I had been contemptuous of voting, of the bill of
rights, of the judicial procedure as bourgeois snares and delusions.
Now I derived an almost sensuous pleasure from watching and
taking part in democratic processes. For the first time in my life
I accepted jury service 5 and the memory of demonstration trials,
death sentences behind closed doors, mass executions without trial
gave that task a peculiar relish. Crude as the system of justice
might be, the accused at least had a sportsmanlike chance to de-
fend themselves. In the presidential campaign of 1936, I became
the publicity director of the American Labor Party in New York
State and knew the elation of political freedom. I saw all the
forces of organized wealth go down in thundering defeat before
the popular will.

The indictment against our racketeering civilization still stands,
but there are basic rights and values which must be saved in any
reconstruction of that civilization, otherwise we shall have a suc-
cessful operation — and a dead patient.

The interview in Villeneuve became increasingly significant as
time went on. Romain Rolland’s panicky acceptance of the Rus-
sian brand of socialism — a socialism divested of all progressive
ideals, all “democratic prejudices,” and divesting itself rapidly of
its internationalist prejudices as well — was typical of the acceptance
I saw around me in America. With teeth clenched, eyes shut tight,
minds barricaded, American radicals (except some despised “rene-
gades”) were holding on to the lesser evil.

Exaggerated faith in the Soviet experiment had become the in-
tellectual fashion. The more openly the Stalin regime moved away
from socialism, the more ardently these latterday communists
championed the “socialist fatherland.” They were obliged to as-
similate so many blows to their human sensibilities, as the Kremlin
piled enormity upon enormity, slaughter upon slaughter, that the
process became a sort of conditioned reflex 5 every new brutality,
every new liquidation of Bolshevik leaders, automatically stiffened
their know-nothing faith.

It would have been polite and socially profitable to bolster up

626 REDEDICATION

eager misconceptions. I needed only to fall into step to be re-
ceived by the intellectual elite, and the temptations were strong
enough. But the imprint of what I had seen in Russia was too
deep upon my nerves. I could not bring myself to play the intel-
lectual stooge.

Yesterday’s liberals, in particular, were resentful of the truth.
They had turned into “communists” of the Russian brand just
when the Russians ceased pretending that their brand was com-
munist. But they had not the courage to match their new con-
victions. They asked questions about the U.S.S.R. but ran off
horrified when my answers were not to their acquired taste. It
seemed to me that these men and women, insulted to their mar-
row by the iniquities of bourgeois society, were wiping out the
insult in Japanese style by committing mental hara-kiri. They
might survive as “revolutionaries” (until, at least, a revolution
came along to destroy them) but they were committing suicide as
reasoning creatures.

I marveled at their mental agility. In the same book, sometimes
in the same paragraph, they could celebrate the real democracy
of the Soviet system, as against the bogus democracy of the par-
liamentary governments — and the abandonment of that real de-
mocracy for the bogus kind. They could excoriate a political purge
in one country on the same page where they boasted of a politi-
cal purge of vastly larger scope in Russia, without seeming so
much as aware of the inconsistency. Though they had pity for
the sharecroppers of our South and for suffering peasants in Pata-
gonia, they had not a sigh to spare for the millions deliberately
starved to death by the Kremlin in southern Russia.

Inevitably, I drifted into arguments — Russia could not be dis-
cussed, it must be argued. Try as I would to keep the squabbles
within reasonably factual limits, they degenerated instantly into
sprawling swamps of generalization. We trudged knee-deep in
slogans, through a jungle of dialectics, ideologies, deviations, and
formulas. We detoured into morasses of citations, mostly a little
vague at the edges, from Marx, Lenin and lesser prophets even
unto Browder and Duranty.

As we argued, the everyday Russia I knew receded farther and
farther into the background 5 soon it was forgotten altogether. The

TO TELL OR NOT TO TELL 627

one hundred and sixty million flesh-and-blood Soviet citizens were
displaced by heroic or villainous abstractions of poster quality. A
great deal was said about a contraption labeled Dictatorship of the
Proletariat, but nothing about who dictated to whom. Industriali-
zation bulked large, but nary a word was permitted about actual
working conditions, trifles like forced labor, passportization, real
wages.

An extraordinary importance attached, above all, to the in-
surmountable limitations of petty bourgeois minds — specifically, my
own— when watching history in flux: in distinguishing, for in-
stance, between black and white, hunger and satiety, misery and
boundless joy. The counts on which my testimony was invali-
dated amounted roughly to this:

I was too close to the Russian picture for a proper perspective
and too isolated in the foreign colony to get close enough to the
picture, while afflicted with a Petty Bourgeois Mentality that pre-
vented me from grasping the true dialectic inwardness of outward
phenomena and so conditioned by my revolutionary background
as to overlook whole sectors of reality. Further, I failed to take
the long view prescribed for others, while refusing to admit the
exigences that forced a short view upon a regime trying to get
along in a difficult world. I had managed to remain in Moscow
for so many years because I was a willing tool of the kept capitalist
press, and I did not manage to remain any longer for the same
reason. I was clearly a hireling of Wall Street apprenticed to the
Nazis, not to mention Trotsky. Obviously I knew too much about
Russia for a clear judgment — couldn’t see the forest for the trees,
you know 5 besides, I didn’t know enough about Russia, having
been too deep in the forest to see the trees, which, in fact, had
changed shape and foliage anyhow since I was unable to see
them.

Should this bill of particulars leave a few shreds of credibility
on my Soviet experiences, more violent methods were at hand.
The ethical no-man’s land in which everything is fair, once re-
stricted to love and war, had been extended to embrace disagree-
ments on Russia. No holds were barred, least of all strangleholds
on personal character. I was familiar with the fantastic whispering
campaigns against others whose Russian opinions were “unde-

628 REDEDICATION

sirable”; now I saw such a campaign, spread around my own
character. It grew more fanciful with every article I published.
Interesting reports about my villainy, rather flattering in their
assumptions of my staggering capacity for evil, reached me al-
ways in the same words, as though emanating from one source.
Sometimes I stared in wide-eyed admiration at the opulence of the
creative lying.

The irresponsible libels all had the same advantage for those
who resented my views; they made it superfluous to discuss those
views. Having demolished my character, the disputed facts could
be dismissed with a superior shrug.

2

One day I was invited to a staff luncheon of the New Republic.
Billy went with me. Presumably the staff were interested in ob-
taining my fresh reactions to Russia. I was given an opening to
denounce those books which had told too much about Russia. The
G.P.U. had just been “abolished,” being converted into a Com-
missariat for Internal Affairs. By stretching my conscience, I might
have consoled that congregation of high-minded editors with hopes
of a new era of liberalism dawning for the Russians. But I sacri-
ficed the chance for reconcilation. Instead I alluded to the famine
and a few other unpleasantnesses.

Immediately a chill came over the luncheon. The eyes of the
New Republic were glued to the plates, and I knew that nevermore
would I be invited. I was guilty of the most heinous offense:
puncturing noble delusions. The Olympian irony of the scene —
and I could not help smiling at it inwardly— is that they, their
exact kind, were being stamped out in the Soviet Union like so
many obnoxious insects. They fitted perfectly into the hated cate-
gory of pre-revolutionary intellectuals who must hide in dark
cracks, praying only for the boon of invisibility.

Of my former friends among communist leaders, only one
had the urge or the audacity to face the shameless backslider.
If this traffic with an untouchable becomes known, the daring young
man may still be punished; unless he had the dialectic foresight
to obtain a dispensation for this one brief interview with an in-

TO TELL OR NOT TO TELL 629

fidel. Tom (though that is not his name) and I had been young
and ardent together once, and this was our first confrontation since
1931. My memory of the meeting ranks second only to the meet-
ing with Rolland among the tragi-comic scenes of my retreat from
Moscow.

“You must believe me, Gene,” Tom began, in the dim light
of a Greenwich Village ex-speakeasy, “that I have not joined the
chorus of abuse against you. I know you too well to doubt that
your views are honest. That’s why I decided to talk to you. . . .”

We talked. I warmed up to the theme. Page by page I turned
the book of my Russian observations. I skipped over the most
somber pages because my friend seemed so distressed. I paused
consolingly to interject a standardized apology for the Kremlin
which, after all, was neck-deep in problems and helplessly fenced
in by centuries of backwardness. But even at that the story was
not too cheerful.

Tom listened — and drank whiskey. Could it really be, he asked
— and threw down a few more “straights.” How awful, he said —
and ordered another bottle. Tom is not a heavy drinker ordinarily.
This sudden thirst was plainly psychological.

“If I thought half of what you tell me to be true,” he said
weakly, “I would come out openly against it. Believe me I would.”

I was startled by this blasphemy. “You can’t mean that . . .
you would then be giving ammunition to the reactionaries, just
as I am supposed to be doing.”

“There is such a thing as intellectual integrity,” Tom mur-
mured, as though arguing with himself. “This is not the kind of
communism I am giving my life to. . . He was now flushed
with drink.

Our conversation had a conspiratory edge — the dim lights, Tom’s
disconsolate embarrassment, his unconscious anxiety to wash out
doubts with alcohol. It was silly of me to go on, but I was too
wound up to stop of my own accord. And at the precise point
where the logic of the talk demanded conclusions and decisions,
Tom collapsed, literally collapsed across the table, snoring drunk.
His deliverance, I am sure, was induced by spiritual anguish more
than by whiskey.

We carried him out of the impious rendezvous and delivered
him home. Presumably he awoke from that stupor with his faith

630 REDEDICATION

wholly repaired. I never heard from him again and his writing
on Soviet themes remained as spotlessly “official” as ever before.

I threw together some vignettes of Soviet life for a book called
Moscow Carrousel. Every sketch had been written under the direct
impact of some actual event or experience. But before submitting
it to the publishers, I went through the manuscript carefully and
deleted words, phrases, entire sections which might offend com-
munist sensibilities too sharply. I was still under compelling psy-
chological pressure to save face for the revolution. There was
scarcely a hint in the book of the towering horrors which I have
recounted in the present volume. More than that, I wrote in
pages of apology, putting them into the mouths of fictitious Rus-
sians, to blunt the effect of “unfriendly” passages. The book stands
as a monument to my indecision and cowardice 5 I soon came to
feel ashamed of its mealy-mouthed evasions.

But carefully as I had edited it, the “liberal” reviewers were
appalled (what the communist reviewers did to me can well be
imagined!). The daily book critic of a New York paper, for in-
stance, left the implication that my “difficulties with the censors”
were in large part responsible for my acid pictures of Soviet every-
day life. Thus neatly he disposed of facts too harsh for his stomach.

I wrote him, pointing out that 90% of Moscow Carrousel , hav-
ing been written before the “difficulties” to which he alludes, could
hardly be credited to that event. “My feelings on the Bolshevik
methods of procedure have nothing to do with personal difficul-
ties,” I assured him. “It was the other way around — the difficulties
came because of my feelings. And, in sober fact, there were no
difficulties. I lived comfortably and on the whole received better
treatment than most other correspondents.” To which the critic
replied with this curious and revealing explanation:

I think that any newspaperman who lived for years in Moscow seems
to acquire a certain morbidity of mind, which expresses itself in various
ways. Your book seemed to me to suggest that you had suffered less
from it than might have been anticipated.

The “undesirable” conclusions about the U.S.S.R. of foreign,
newspapermen thus boils down to a mental ailment! I cite this
critic only as typical of the self-consolatory thinking about Russia

TO TELL OR NOT TO TELL 63 I

then in vogue. He did not stop to analyze why Moscow gives
normal newspaperman “a certain morbidity of mind.” Evidently
it did not occur to him to seek the causes in the Moscow realities
rather than in private difficulties with censors. Like the New Re-
public editors, he preferred the soothing thought that the fault
was not with the Kremlin but with some mysterious aberration in
the correspondent’s mind or character.

At a house party one day I was introduced to a mother and her
sixteen-y ear-old daughter. The girl had read something of mine
in a magazine and seemed thrilled to meet an author in the flesh.
There was real enthusiasm in her voice.

“Eugene Lyons?” she exclaimed. “I know you — why, Pve
cursed you!”

On that foundation we quickly became good friends that eve-
ning. Russia for her was not a real place with real people. It was
the never-never land of her burgeoning idealism. Except for their
more expert and more desperate rationalization, it was the land
which she shared with the Rollands, the Webbs, my friend Tom,
the legions of intellectuals who had bartered logic and their entire
heritage of libertarian and humanistic ideals for a solid faith backed
up by a Red Army and a G.P.U. Inquisition.

More sharply than ever I faced the dilemma: to tell or not to
tell . Now, I first realized how powerful a brake my residence in
Russia, the professional need to keep the Soviet doors open, had
been upon my writing. But there were other brakes. The desire
to “belong,” not to be a political dog in the manger, was a constant
inducement to cautious understatement. And in six years I had
sunk roots in the Russian soil. I loved Russia and its people. Yet
I knew for a certainty that the Soviet gates, inscribed with the
slogan, “Workers of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but
your chains,” would be closed to me if I did not chain my tongue.

These personal considerations I settled easily enough. The deci-
sion, indeed, was automatic, a moral reflex action. The same im-
pulses that had taken me from college into movements for the
defense of political prisoners, now forced me to disregard these
private interests.

The social considerations, however, were not so easy to appraise
or to act upon. Forces of reaction and fascism, of anti-Semitism and

REDEDICATION

632

know-nothingism, were unquestionably at work in America. The
new Russia, rightly or wrongly, had come in myriad minds to
symbolize the opposition to these forces. The symbol was gro-
tesquely unlike the reality I had seen and felt and tasted. But
was it not more desirable, perhaps, to leave the symbol intact?

Intellectually, I answered the question in the negative. I had
come to believe that every defense of Stalin’s methods was a de-
fense of fascist methods, on which reaction fattened and grew
stronger. Psychologically, however, I had not quite freed myself
from old inhibitions. The diluted, pussyfooting Moscow Carrousel
is proof enough. Facing an audience of earnest, hopeful Americans,
workers and middle class people, I still could not bring myself
to speak with a whole mouth. I shrank from hurting those of my
listeners who had invested all their hopes and all their faith in
the new Russia. They cursed me as a renegade for the little I
did tell them, never guessing how carefully I wrapped facts in
soft words to dull the blow. I could not even resent their curses —
my sympathies were entirely on their side.

It was more than a year before I overcame those inhibitions.
An article in Harper's Magazine, which I called To Tell or Not
to Tell , signalized that inner victory. During that year I had
become more deeply certain that in defending Soviet brutalities,
the communists were fertilizing the American ground for brutali-
ties of an opposite order. The shrill oh-and-ah enthusiasm for
Russia which I found among the well-to-do in their penthouses
and duplex apartments was a dangerous parlor game. Here, as in
Germany before Hitler, the Bolsheviks were propagating a type
of thinking — a disdain for human life, a contempt for truth, a
glorification of brute force — which was essentially fascist, totali-
tarian. In helping Americans to conquer their “democratic preju-
dices” and their respect for individual freedom, the communists
were opening for them an easy path to fascism. Leftist fascism —
looking to an absolute state that planned and controlled all econ-
omy — was a large element in putting both Mussolini and Hitler
in power; it figured also in the ideology thrown up hastily by
Franco in Spain. The fascist approach to human problems, the
moral putrescence that stripped the socialist hope of its ethical and
progressive associations, must be fought under whatever labels they
paraded 5 indeed, a Marxist label made the poison more deadly.

TO TELL OR NOT TO TELL 633

Two lectures at the Community Church forum in New York,
one soon after my arrival, the other late in 1935, are a measure
of the new courage which I drew from these convictions. That
forum is largely patronized by men and women on the periphery
of the communist movement. In the first talk I pulled my punches,
feeling like a fraud when I did it. In the second I dared speak
my thoughts. I was roundly abused, of course, from the floor.
But I left that hall buoyed by the feeling that in a few minds at
least I had broken down the blockade against independent thinking.

3

The international communist movement is soaked through and
through with a fetid machiavellism that lies to its own adherents
and to the rest of the world. Rationalized in terms of duty and
ultimate goals, prevarication becomes a lop-sided virtue instead of
a fault — -just one more weapon in the “final conflict” that will
“free the human race.” Thomas Mann, speaking in New York
in April, 1937, warned eloquently against this mentality; against
a kind of man who has “here and there attained absolute power,”
who “without scruple . . . commits or approves crimes, provided
they serve his advantage, or what he calls his advantage; he has
no dread of falsehood, but reckons falsehood as high as truth, pro-
vided only that it is useful in his sense of the word.” Communist
leaders have lost self-consciousness in the matter and even take
pride in their skill in sleight-of-mind. Devious thinking has be-
come for them, as for their psychological blood-brothers in the
fascist camp, normal and habitual, so that straightforward truth-
telling seems shocking and perverse in their eyes.

One must understand this, if he is to make any sense out of
such phenomena as fervent denials of the obvious; ardent “con-
fessions” to palpable lies in open court; suppression and adjust-
ment of statistics; hysterical attacks on persons who tell tales out
of the Soviet school; books about the U.S.S.R. so far from the
flesh-and-blood Russians that they might as well refer to some
country on the other side of the moon.

The whole movement is committed to a theory of multiple
truths, each diluted and doctored for the palate and stomach of
the recipient, beginning with a “true” truth for the uppermost

634 REDEDICATION

layer o£ leaders and graduated down to downright lies for the
masses. In between are synthetic mixtures for special groups: a
truth for the initiated officialdom whose self-interest helps them
digest harsher morsels j a specially perfumed truth for Fabians,
intellectuals, artists, who are known to be allergic to the bloodier
ingredients.

The American sector of the communist world seemed to me
rotten with this machiavellism. The springs of natural idealism
were dammed up, and a flow of arbitrary “directives” from Mos-
cow headquarters took their place. Endless fake organizations were
hatched, each dressed up with a respectable false front of com-
placent or innocent clergymen, social workers, befogged million-
aires, journalists living a dual capitalist and communist life under
different names. All these organizations were in effect different
names for the same clique of small-time Napoleons. The revo-
lutionary pig-Latin of “Party lines” and “fronts” and dialectics
had displaced connected thinking and open discussion. Literary
blackmail and logrolling for “proletarian art” had displaced honest
Left criticism. The superior logic which castigated radicals and
trade-unionists of the wrong denominations as “social fascists” man-
aged to take under its wing everything from Utopian pacifism to
religious maniacs in Harlem. The ease with which yesterday’s
slogans were cast out and new ones, often diametrically opposite,
adopted overnight showed how expert the movement had become
in mental jiu-jitsu.

American communism had need for its charlatanism, because
its fundamental assumption was make-believe. It was a militant
proletarian party without proletarians in its ranks. Having failed
to find a base in the working masses, it came to rest on the more
muddled members of other classes— petty bourgeois and intellec-
tual elements distressed by the sorrows of the world, especially
their own economic uncertainty, and sorely in need of a faith
safely beyond logic. For some of these “communists,” caviar and
vodka took the place of the hammer and sickle as emblems of the
proletarian revolution. Already they had assumed a little of the
manner of commissars and dictators. These recruits were in evi-
dence at official Soviet consular and diplomatic functions, at ban-
quets of self-styled friends of the new Russia, and mutual admira-
tion parties thrown by well-to-do Left intellectuals. They pressed

TO TELL OR NOT TO TELL 635

every last drop of titillation from their status as capitalist anti-
capitalists.

In my own mind these economic masochists figured as “pent-
house Bolsheviks.” This private christening derived from an ex-
clusive penthouse party— exclusive in the sense that only true-blue
admirers of the Soviets were invited. The opulence of the setting,
the abundance of caviar and champagne, the well-heeled guests
and well-groomed Soviet diplomats in attendance, even the in-
congruous presence (for atmosphere) of a few unkempt specimens
of the genuine article, composed into a delightful burlesque on
revolution. They were celebrating the “inevitable” collapse of
their social system in warm comradeship up there above the New

York skyscrapers It was all so cozy. Once, not long after

I reached New York, I found myself in a stiff-shirted evening-
gowned company in one of the swankiest hotels 5 chiefly wealthy
people with arty and intellectual hobbies. When Russia was men-
tioned I discovered that I was in a minority of one — they were
all “communists”!

I pilloried their breed in an impolite article and the phrase
“pent house Bolsheviks” gained wide currency.

Depending for its support so extensively upon middle-class folk,
American communism was unavoidably more parsimonious with
the “true” truth than communists, let us say, in France or pre-
Hitler Germany. It was a mythical Russia which had “already
entered the stage of true socialism,” a Russia of “the world’s
most democratic constitution,” the “happy life” and “classless so-
ciety” that was being entrenched in the American mind. So many
weary or bored or panicky Americans had made their spiritual
homes in its wonder-chambers that anyone who threatened to
undermine its foundations was treated as a shameless vandal. Per-
haps he was.

Way back in the years when I was sending American news to
Tass in Moscow I knew that only a small fraction, the “safe” and
“desirable” information, would be passed on to ordinary Russian
readers 3 the rest would be circulated for the private enlighten-
ment of leaders who rated the “true” truth. The sifting is even
more careful with information about Russia allowed to percolate
to the outside world. In this task the Kremlin has the perfervid
collaboration of whole battalions of wishful-thinking foreigners 3

REDED ICATIOTsT

636

we have seen them in these pages, trooping gaily amidst the hor-
rors, intent on the pretty colors o£ their own illusions. These are
the amateurs.

In addition every nation has its contingent of professional inter-
preters of Russia who have made it their life’s career to maintain
appearances for the U.S.S.R. as Utopia-in-construction. With few
exceptions they are a high-minded crew, coloring and concealing
things with the noblest motives. Devotees of the theory of multiple
truths, they speak more candidly than they write, and they think
more candidly than they speak. They would as soon give the un-
diluted truth to their politically backward countrymen, whether
readers of The Nation or the comic strips, as they would ad-
minister poison to children. Theirs is the logic of old-fashioned
mothers who lie about sex to pubescent daughters — the American
public, in their view, is simply too young, politically speaking, for
the facts of Russian life. A few of them, I know, have inner
qualms 3 the rest, on the contrary, feel positively heroic, strong
in their ability to dispense with petty bourgeois prejudices about
truth and mass brutality.

I decided, for myself, that I must tell the truth as I saw it.
The decision in time assumed the magnitude of a pressing moral
obligation.

V. Adventure in Idealism

DEVELOPMENTS in the Soviet Union since my departure have
confirmed and deepened the conclusions forced upon me by my
six years of personal observation.

The international alignment called for Soviet gestures to soothe
the sensibilities of democratic nations which are potential allies in
the looming war. The new Party line of united popular fronts,
embracing all anti-fascist groups except communists disowned by
Stalin, likewise demanded a pretense of democracy. Policy inside
the country, however, remained stubbornly totalitarian. Prisons
and “isolators” remained crowded with political dissenters 5 com-
munists who strayed from the catechism continued to be dumped
in Siberia and the Far North. The purges, in fact, grew bloodier.

Every new wave of hope for the liberalization and humanization
of the Kremlin regime broke sickeningly on crags of terror. The
G.P.U. was “abolished” by being rechristened Commissariat for
Internal Affairs. The applause of the desperate optimists was still
reverberating through the world when the assassination of Sergei
Kirov evoked a saturnalia of vengeance. The “abolished” G.P.U.
under its new name had lost none of its sadistic appetites.

Immediately after the promulgation of “the world’s most demo-
cratic constitution” came the panicky annihilation of leading Old
Bolsheviks — Kamenev, Zinoviev, Piatakov, Smirnov, Serebriakov,
a dozen others — and the arrest of thousands more. The closest
collaborators of Lenin were killed off in obscene haste after demon-
stration trials that were a mockery of the new constitutional guar-
antees. “Confessions” by demoralized prisoners to incredible accu-
sations sown with self-evident lies, unsupported by documents or
other independent evidence, without the formality of a credible de-
fense, were made the excuse for wholesale extermination of the
men who made the Bolshevik revolution. The fathers of the Soviet
revolution were forced to paint themselves abjectly as depraved
monsters, degenerates, allies of the most reactionary governments

638 REDEDICATION

in the world. The whole story reeked with the crude melodrama of
the police mind. To believe any portion of it — other than that
these founders of the Soviet Union despised Stalin and his regime
as counterrevolutionary usurpers — would be to believe that the
revolution was corrupt at its roots from the beginning. One man
or a dozen may prove to be perverted arch-criminals, but that
nearly all those who stood in the highest places in the first years of
the Soviet revolution were of this stamp is too great a strain on
credulity. And even if they were traitors ten times over — especially
if they were men of such low moral caliber — why should they
suddenly turn against themselves, besmirch their records as Bol-
sheviks, bare their villainy for all to see? The working of dreadful
pressures is so clear that only the desperation of unreasoned faith
or the cynicism of self-interest can compass credence in the trials.

Immediately thereafter came the sensational executions of a
large number of the highest ranking leaders of the Red Army,
among them newly created Field Marshals, national heroes of the
civil war period, the heads of the mammoth civilian military train-
ing organizations: men like Tukhachevsky, Putna, Yakir. A wave
of suicides engulfed leaders of the governments in constituent
Soviet Republics, veteran revolutionists like Tomsky, key person-
alities in the Kremlin hierarchy like Vice-Commissar of War
Gamarnik. No dependable facts beyond the standardized charges
in the official communiques are available and it may be decades
before the truth of the bloody debacle in high quarters will be
known, if ever.

Neither can anyone do more than guess at the truth behind the
routine charges of “banditry,” Trotskyism, collaboration with Hit-
ler and Japan, lodged against former Premier Alexei Rykov;
Nikolai Bukharin; Jacob Doletzky, for some fifteen years chief
of the official Soviet news agency; outstanding Soviet journalists
like Vladimir Romm and Lapinsky; the heads of the Jewish
colonization effort in Biro-Bidjan; practically all the important
leaders of the trade unions; the key people in nearly every im-
portant department of Soviet life. The charges are not mere polit-
ical disputation— they spell ruin, imprisonment, exile, suicide, capi-
tal punishment for the thousands involved. Even those who were
in direct control of the atrocities to which I was witness— yes, the
very G.P.U. chieftains who prepared the information on which

ADVENTURE IN IDEALISM 639

Old Bolsheviks are being destroyed — are under arrest, accused not
only of counterrevolution but of ordinary embezzlement.

The whole tragic process is shrouded in mystery. The only cer-
tainty is that on the eve of the twentieth birthday of the Bolshevik
state, treachery and horror and violent death are daily common-
places. Taking the official version of the orgiastic liquidations at
face value, we still have the spectacle of fearsome discontents,
maniacal hatreds, and desperate disillusionment precisely among
those who have sacrificed most and achieved most for the revo-
lution. Unlimited terror has bred constantly new terrors through
the years. The only certainty is that the Kremlin stands neck-deep
in blood. The very basic elements of the Leninist-Trotskyist-Stalin-
ist methods of revolution are in disrepute. The cumulative and
gigantic sacrifice may be justified ultimately, when history’s record
is clearer, chiefly as an object lesson how not to make revolutions .

One after another, at the same time, the remaining progressive
and idealistic elements in the Soviet system have been liquidated.
Old ranks and titles were restored. The enlightened attitudes to-
ward birth control and family relations, which won for Russia
more liberal and radical adherents than its economic innovations,
were abandoned. The wage and class differentiations adopted out
of necessity were, by 1936, sanctified by neo-Marxist labels. Every-
thing modern or advanced or experimental in music, architecture,
literature, pedagogy was ostracized as “bourgeois Leftism,” loaded
with ridicule, proscribed by arbitrary edict.

Any one of these things in itself may be unimportant. Some of
them may be defensible. Taken together, their meaning seems to
me beyond dispute: evident to the naked intelligence not blinded
by fanaticism. The central fact of these last Russian years has been
the intense entrenchment of the new ruling political and economic
groups on a basis of thoroughgoing conservatism. There has been
a constantly stronger reaction against modernism in every depart-
ment of Soviet life. The status quo of socialism-in-construction,
with its bureaucracy, its sharply stratified population, its contrasts
of poverty and ease, its renunciation of that mood and temper
which may be called, for lack of a better word, advanced, has
emerged as fixed, static, one of the great forces for conservatism

REDEDICATION

64O

in the present-day world. Other impulses may hammer down this
system, but every ounce o£ the Kremlin’s energy is now invested
in establishing and maintaining a world equilibrium. The logic of
Russia’s struggle for survival as a state, coupled with absolutist
government, has landed it in the camp of desperate and militant
conservatism.

Underlying Moscow’s new conservatism in every branch of its
existence is the tacit admission that the present Soviet system will
remain unaltered as long as its rulers can stave off change. The
“tr ansi tion period” has been accepted for all practical purposes as
permanent.

It requires no special perspicacity to recognize that certain
groups in the Soviet population by this time have large stakes in
the “transition period,” and that the normal conservatism of human
nature — product of habit and fear of change — is operative. I refer
not merely to the infinitesimal minority in the Kremlin, that small,
closely-knit governing oligarchy, but its millionfold foundation
of inter-dependent officials : the bureaucrats, large classes of privi-
leged military and police officials, administrators, better-paid tech-
nical workers, the new Soviet-made intelligentsia.

The revolutionary driving force had petered out long ago, and
in the last few years we have been watching the rebound. Those
radicals who prefer to fool themselves with the old slogans and
shut their eyes to the actualities are in fact supporting a reaction
which with every month brings the Soviet state closer in essence
to the fascist states in Germany and Italy.

The new Russian chauvinism, this or that decree, the liquidation
of this composer or that novelist, a thousand other expressions of
the reaction may each be argued or defended in itself. But the
defense, assuredly, cannot rest on “revolutionary” grounds ; no
matter how impressive the arguments, they are tory arguments
unrelated to the original philosophy and the original impetus of
the revolution. The attitude which we normally associate with a
revolutionary nature— an attitude of scientific skepticism, defiance
of established authority, freedom from intellectual bondage,
healthy doubt of the infallibility of dead or living prophets, coura-
geous defense of unorthodox views — are more alien to Stalin’s party
than to Stanley Baldwin’s or Herbert Hoover’s. The U.S.S.R.

ADVENTURE IN IDEALISM 64 1

no longer has any room for agitators and innovators, whether
in government, economy, or the arts. Its ideals, like the ideals of
every ruling clique, are stability, productivity, conservatism.

Sooner or later, the fervid friends of the U.S.S.R the world
over will have to separate in their minds the economic innovations
(state ownership of all the means of production and distribution)
from the cultural and human reaction ; an economic set-up that
has in it the germ of the world’s future from a political set-up
that is wholly of the past; the Marxist formulas from the Stalinist
actualities. They will have to distinguish between Russia and the
socialist dream.

Until they make that adjustment they will continue to defend
every form of injustice and obscurantism, every reactionary thought
and act, every insult to their larger hopes, merely because these
are stamped “Made in the U.S.S.R.” Though tormented in their
private conscience, they will continue to stand up for such parodies
of justice as the Zinoviev-Radek trials; for the degradation of
the human spirit, the sycophancy, the one-man rule through one
controlled party, which are increasingly the marks of old Russia
in its new habiliments.

2

Stalin stands as the symbol of the “permanent transition” which
has taken the place of the permanent revolution once basic in
socialist thinking. The purity of his motives and his fitness for the
job are of only academic interest. Like his Romanov predecessor,
Stalin works his will through governmental machinery: a Polit-
buro, a Cabinet, a Central Committee, an impotent legislature.
What is crucially important is the restoration of a single, personal
incarnation of the state. The ancient Russian symbol of absolutism,
the “Little Father,” is again enthroned.

The glorification of Stalin must be seen to be believed. I quote
at random from Soviet newspapers on my desk:

Our own, our passionately beloved, our great leader, Comrade
Stalin. . . . The unmatched genius and courage and brilliant wisdom
of the great and beloved Stalin. . . . To you, Comrade Stalin, whose
marvelous leadership brings us still more socialist triumphs. . . . Long
live the great Stalin, leader and inspirer of the working classes of the

REDEDICATION

642

whole world. . . . The great and glorious Stalin, head and brilliant
theoretician of the world revolution. . . . Stalin, the great and be-
loved. . . .

As recently as 1928 or 1929, it was still possible to find an
unadorned reference to the “boss” (as communist officials call him
in private) simply as Comrade Stalin. Today, the name is never
mentioned publicly without a profound verbal genuflection. The
continuous hosannas depend on repetition rather than originality
for their effect. The adjectives and qualifying phrases in which the
ineffable name is cushioned are fairly standardized. Innovations,
even in the direction of juicier flattery, are dangerous. A new ad-
jective needs the sanction of usage in the columns of Pravda or
in the mouth of some impeccable grand vizier like Kaganovich
before it is woven into the routine litanies of praise.

Currently the words most used are veliki i liubimi — “great and
beloved.” They are so continuously attached to his name that they
have lost their original contours and merged with Stalin, like a
part of his name or a prescribed title. The most casual mention in
a public gathering is the signal for a demonstration— every speaker
automatically pauses for the ovation, just as a trained comedian
pauses for his laugh. In printed matter, the worship has been
standardized to a point which to an outsider is not without humor.
Other objects worthy of enthusiasm are followed in the stenogram
by the one word “applause.” When the occasion is the mention
of Stalin or anything pertaining to Stalin the parentheses record
“thunderous applause” or “stormy applause,” and sometimes add,
“everybody rises and sings the International .” A wisecrack from
any less elevated source may be followed in the record by the
word “laughter.” A witticism by Stalin is invariably followed by
“hilarious laughter.” In a published photograph where Stalin
appears with other leaders, the line underneath identifies the fig-
ures in the picture by listing Stalin first, regardless where he may
be located in the line-up, then going back to the left to list the
others. His name in an editorial is always printed in larger letters
than the rest of the text, just as the name of deity is capitalized
in Western print.*

* Recently, in 1937, a curb was ordered on the verbal adulation of Stalin, but
the substance, in his deification, remains unchanged.

ADVENTURE IN IDEALISM 643

The fawning exaltation of the man is official and largely syn-
thetic. The Russian people do not know him. The glorification is
almost impersonal. Not a real, living, human Stalin, but the figure
carefully molded by Party politicians and publicists is the recipient
of the adulation. The character of that synthetic figure changes:
at the height of the Iron Age it was a symbol cast in iron; now it
is increasingly a benevolent leader kissing a little child. . . .

The worship is exaggerated but not exuberant. It is vast but
neither deep nor soaring. The newspapers and orators and poets
who sing paeans of praise to Stalin are official newspapers, official
orators, and official poets. Possibly this apotheosis is not wholly his
own doing. He may have been convinced that for his subjects,
conditioned by centuries of autocracy at one end and slavery at
the other, power must be personified in one man. When I left
Russia, I was sure that the exaltation of a mortal creature could
not be carried any further. I was mistaken. The Soviet press
bulges with proofs that the human animal’s capacity for groveling
sycophancy is literally boundless.

Powerful beyond any medieval tsar in his own domain, the
“great and beloved” is also acknowledged pretender to an inter-
national throne as dictator of the Comintern. Millions in all na-
tions of the world bring him unquestioning obedience as the incar-
nation of their hopes, recognizing no fatherland but his Russia.
Underground in places like Japan and Germany, aboveground in
most countries, the viceroys of Stalin, leaders of their respective
communist sections, are ever alert for the snap of his whip, the
accent of his wishes. The pseudo-scientific movement which he
has broken to his will has been raised to a pitch of mystic con-
secration, so that he is at once emperor and pope, general and
infallible oracle, comrade and master.

Stalin is without the cool genius of a Lenin, without the flam-
boyant talents of a Mussolini, without the hysterical fervor of a
Hitler. An uninspired practical politician, this slow-moving, slow-
thinking but implacable Caucasian has hoarded and organized
power slowly through his years and made himself the strongest
person on the face of the earth. Reckoned by the numbers who
willingly or under coercion bring him allegiance, Stalin’s temporal
empire dwarfs Caesar’s and Napoleon’s, and it has a spiritual con-
sent theirs did not possess.

REDEDICATION

644

Thus the collectivist idea has come to fruition in the apotheosis
of an individual. Absolutism reigns in the name of a collectivist
philosophy. One man is regent for Demos — which, come to think
of it, was precisely the role of the “tyrants” in ancient Greece.
History has again played one of its gruesome jokes and the cosmic
bellylaugh will echo through endless generations.

3

In my six years in the Soviet Union there was little of the spec-
tacular. There were routine difficulties without end and buzzing
annoyances and occasional half-hearted threats of expulsion. There
were intense moments of purely professional achievement or fail-
ure, isolated episodes bordering on drama, and a vast number of
human contacts touched with high color.

But I can inflate none of these experiences into major personal
risks in the do-and-dare tradition of newspaper legend. At no time
did I endanger life or limb or face any more serious hazard than
a bruised conscience or a reprimand from the home office. As for
the shrill little triumphs and defeats of competitive journalism,
they seem petty enough in retrospect.

Even at the time, these five-minute scoops and ten-minute beat-
ings were edged with absurdity. Against the background of desper-
ation and enthusiasm and pitiless bigotry, against the life-and-
death struggles amidst which we foreigners had our sheltered
alien being, the breathless race of American newspapermen to file
an emasculated blue-penciled little dispatch ninety seconds before
a rival was, in sober fact, grotesque. When the dispatch, as so often
happened, dealt in mealy-mouthed fashion with some decree that
snapped the props from under millions of human existences, that
race for a few seconds 3 advantage was almost obscene.

No, there was no melodrama in my foreign assignment. The
surveillance to which we were subjected had nothing in common
with the terror which, as I saw a thousand times over, turned
strong men and women into whimpering wretches, bled them
white of all dignity and self-respect. We lived in relative spacious-
ness in the midst of ghastly overcrowding, and never lacked cake
when bread was a luxury to 90% of our neighbors.

Yet the six years are in my mind like some great and continuous
adventure, crowded with vivid excitement and suffused with deep

ADVENTURE IN IDEALISM 645

feeling. Though I was myself never hurt, the memory is filled
with pain. Though my function was merely to cable news develop-
ments tersely and inexpensively, the memory is touched with
elations and flaring hopes. It seems a stretch of turbulence marked
off by the calmer years that preceded and the quiet since my
return.

When I try to trace that turbulence to its source, I discover
that it flows from the things that happened to Russia and its people
rather than to me.

The adventure was real enough. But I lived it on an intellectual
and emotional plane rather than a physical level. The feelings
stirred in my blood by the first mass demonstration on Red Square,
by the unfoldment of the Shakhty trial, by my first view of the
Tzik in session, by the epic tragedies of the peasant revolt and
the man-made famine are woven into that intense spiritual adven-
ture. The mental anguish and searching and desperate rationaliza-
tions as my imported certainties crumbled under the hammering
of everyday impressions, likewise, are in the intricate design of
that memory.

The material events were all outside myself. All the promptings
of personal comfort and career were in the direction of casual and
uncritical acceptance of the Soviet scene as raw stuff for reportorial
dispatches — picturesque, titillating, but without inner relation to
my own life. All the pressures of friendship, of respectable con-
formity within my own social group, were for unreasoned hosanna-
singing or, failing that, a synthetic enthusiasm.

Had I been differently constituted, therefore, the Soviet years
might easily have flowed over me without leaving any deep marks.
When I record that I did take the Soviet reality closely to heart
and did become emotionally and mentally involved in the pro-
cesses I was reporting,, I am neither boasting nor apologizing.
The “objectivity” which accepts the revolution, its promises and
its disappointments, as just so much grist for the journalistic mills
was simply beyond me. I had too large an investment of personal
hope and faith at stake.

4

My conscience has stood behind me, looking over my shoulder
as these pages were written. Again and again, it forced me to go
back and re-assay my judgments. Repeatedly, it protested against

REDEDICATION

646

the sharpness of a phrase, the finality of a conclusion. Even more
often it pulled me short when I seemed minded to accept the
shadow for the substance or to flatter the self-deceptions of the
believers. It would not permit me to compromise with that cumula-
tive memory.

And now its voice is more insistent than ever. Have your dreams,
it demands, been a silly delusion? Horror has seared your nerves,
but has it burned out all hope? Were it not better, perhaps, to
bury your knowledge in your own heart instead of carrying it to
others? Because an adventure in idealism in one place has ended
in a new reaction, because a fight for economic freedom has ended
in a new form of slavery, shall you — and millions like you — yield
utterly to despair? Shall you sink your dreams in the muddy
morass of disillusionment, and join the “practical” men in ridi-
culing the utopists, the visionaries, the prophets of all time?

To which I reply: I despair only because I lack the skill and
the eloquence to translate my deepest feelings for other men’s
minds. I wish I were able to convey to them that the Russian
experience has been for me less a disillusionment than a rededica-
tion. It has forced me to pitch my hopes above the merely nutri-
tive, to recognize that man lives not by bread alone. In the knowl-
edge of the Russian experiment I am able once more to affirm
without shame the value of such things as justice, humaneness,
truth, liberty, intellectual integrity, and human dignity. From the
Russian mistakes I have drawn the strength to assert that without
these things social systems can only be variations on the old in-
justice.

I have seen that movements for economic change are worthless,
even dangerous, as soon as they throw off respect for life, for lib-
erty, for justice. The very fact that such an assertion, which would
have sounded axiomatic in the past, now has a quixotic ring is a
measure of the distortion in our mass thinking. Our epoch is gam
grened by a contempt for the protoplasm of society: the individual
human being. It is steeped in a machiavellism that styles itself
“scientific” and hurls all fundamental human values indiscrimi-
nately into the retorts of its “experiments.” Perhaps it is the
revenge of the machine age; its insensitive gods of statistical effi-
ciency have spawned monstrous mechanistic religions in which
people are mere cogs and digits. The gangrene set in with the

ADVENTURE IN IDEALISM 647

World War and has been eating more deeply into the flesh of
the race. It is a stench in the nostrils of mankind in Russia and
Germany, on the battlefields of Ethiopia and Spain. It has turned
leaders and nations into cynical vivisectionists. However the rot-
ting flesh may be disguised with slogans about race and class and
nation, the horror shows through in prisons and concentration
camps and wholesale slaughters of human beings, in ugly fears
and uglier propitiations of flattery.

I, too, was infected by that disease. I was ready to liquidate
classes, purge millions, sacrifice freedoms and elementary decen-
cies, arm self-appointed dictators with a flaming sword — all for
the cause. It was a species of revenge rationalized as social engi-
neering. Then I saw these things in full swing and discovered
that the revenge was being wreaked on the very masses who were
to be saved by that cause. I found that the means are more real
than the professed end; that they harden into a system of power
and privilege which must postpone the end in order to maintain
itself. Having seen the putrescence where the disguise was most
convincing, I have found the courage to declare that I am a
humanitarian, that I respect truth and that I abhor the vivisection
of human beings for their own good.

I am convinced that any philosophy of human progress which
does not rest uncompromisingly on respect for life, no matter how
honest its original intentions, becomes brutalized and defeats its
own professed purposes. A socialism that offers to fill the bellies
of its people but retains the privilege of slitting those bellies at
will is reactionary; it cancels out ages of struggle and costly vic-
tory in the domain of the human spirit. On those terms, indeed,
competitive capitalism too can make the same offer to fill the
bellies of its robots; the bargain has already been struck in Ger-
many and elsewhere. The economic security of a prison or a mili-
tary barracks — the “ideal” for which our epoch seems ready to
barter all the human values accumulated through the ages — seems
to me the most repulsive ever foisted upon mankind. It is the
reductio ad absurdum of a dehumanized materialism.

Precisely today, when such words and such concepts are being
spat upon, it is important that those for whom they still have
some meaning should defend liberty and honesty and justice. The
gangrene cannot be fought in one country and allowed to fester

648 REDEDICATION

in another. No plan for economic salvation must be accepted if
it is diseased with disdain for life. Ultimately, Russia will not be
judged by how much bread it has given its people — by that stand-
ard other countries and other systems may be far more successful —
but by how much freedom, self-respect, justice, equality, truth,
and human kindness it has brought into the world.

I know only too well that those who elect to stand on this
bedrock of human decencies and cherished freedoms will be ex-
posed to the sneers of their more “practical” fellow-men. They
will be pelted with sophistries and insults and under the temp-
tation always to turn “practical” likewise and put on some denomi-
national uniform — to defend one set of horrors against another
instead of fighting them all. They will be taunted because they
cannot provide scientific definitions: “What is this truth, this lib-
erty, this justice of which you prate? What is its color, how much
does it weigh, where have you seen it in its pure form?” As though
we should worship ugliness because no one has succeeded in
defining beauty, or darkness because no one has succeeded in mark-
ing the boundaries of light. . . .

But I know also that through changing systems, through con-
flicting programs, those undefined values have survived and will
survive as the ultimate tests of all systems and all programs.

No set-back can end the adventure in idealism. That adventure
began with the dawn of the race and will continue when the slogans
and phobias of our own day will have been forgotten.

Index

Abbe, Jimmy, 367
Abbe family, 503
Abidova, 3 13-3 14
Abramovich, Rafael, 380
Absolutism, new, 641
Achievement, “average,” 477
Adventure in idealism, 637-648
Aero-sled, 445-446
Aiinogenyev, Alexander, 544
Agrarian socialization. See Collectivi-
zation

Agriculture, 557

Allen, Robert S., 350, 355, 356, 408
Alma-Ata, 312

Ambulances and motor-cars, 436-446
American Labor Party, 625
Americanization, 4-5
Americans in U.S.S.R., 66, 67, 91-92,
234, 255, 520-530
Amtorg, 525

Andreyechine, George, 500
Anti-Semitism. See Jews
Apartment, cooperative, 5 14-5 15
Apologies for the revolution, 423
Arens, Jean, 335, 336
Around the World in Eleven Years,
3 ^ 7 , 503
“Artels,” 322

“Artists,” foreign, in U.S.S.R., 328
Artists, socialization of, 494-496
Asia, Central, 304-319
Assignments, official, 232-234
Associated Press, 159, 220, 251, 336
Association of Proletarian Writers, 246
Astor, David, 428
Astor, Lady, 428, 429, 431-433
Auerbach, Leopold, 246, 332, 494
Authors. See Literature
Autocracy, workings of, 195
Automobiles in U.S.S.R., 440-445
AvantiL 22

“Average” achievement, 477
Aylesworth, Merlin H., 408

Baldwin, Roger, 433
Baring, Maurice, 470
Barnes, Ralph, 519, 521, 546, 573,
588

“Barshai affair,” 188-189
Bartlett, Ashmead, 94
Basseches, Nicholas, 336
Bathing, 512
Bebenko, 1 23-1 24
Beffel, John Nicholas, 33
Beggars, 175
Belinkes, 1 41-142
Bender, Robert J., 433, 597
Bennett, Millie, 510
Berezovsky, 1 21-122
Berkman, Alexander, 38
Bezimensky, 246, 495
Bezfrizorny. See Waifs
Bialik, 463

Bickel, Karl A., 46, 47? 293, 397, 408,
584-585? 597
Biedenkapp, Fred, 12
Billy. See Lyons, Mrs. Eugene
Birchall, Frederick T., 574
Biro-Bidjan, 638
Bisbee, Arizona, 14
Bloor, Ella Reeve, 13
Bluecher (Galen), General, 250
Bokhara, 3 15-3 17
Bolsheviks, Old, annihilation, 637
“Bolsheviks, pent-house,” 635
Bolshevo, 424, 429
Bonstein, George, 1 7
Borah, William E., 408
Borodin, Michael, 296, 331, 513, 510,
607, 609

Bourke-White, Margaret, 543
Brandeis, Louis D., 29, 30
Bratanovsky, 127

INDEX

650

Bread, cards, 178-179; “factories,”
354; lines, 361; shortage, 97-995
transportation forbidden, 488;
white, 447

“Break,” Great ( Perelom ), 196-2x1
British United Press, 429, 569
Britishers, trial of, 561-571, 581
Briusilova, Varvara Ivanovna, 295
Brothers Karamazov , The, 458
Browder, Earl, 626
Bryant, Louise, 500
Budenny, General, 160, 213
Bukharin, Nikolai, 98, 149, 219, 341?

343 > 344 , 3 ^ 9 ? 638
Bulgakov, Michael, 163
Bulletin , Butte, 19
Bullitt, William C., 499 “ 5 01 ) 5 62
Bureaucracy, 75, 1 92-1 95, 232-234

Calder, Jack, 236-237, 353, 574
Call , New York, 10, 19
Capital punishment, 241, 242, 356-
359, 492-493, 560, 637-638
Catherine the Great, 272
Censorship, 57, 1 05-1 13, 170, 171,

252, 253, 381
Central Asia, 304-319
Central Executive Committee ( Tzik ),
164-168, 645

Centralia, Washington, case, 19
Cessarskaya, Emma, 529
Chaliapin, Feodor, 353
Chamberlain, Austen, 10 1, 102
Chamberlin, William Henry, 96, 147,
426, 504, 578 , 57 ^ 588 , 591
Chamberlin, Mrs. William Henry, 430
Chaos, planned, 482-493
Charnovsky, Nikolai, 378
Chekhov story, 512-5x3
Chekists, 436, 47 °- 473 j 583
Chen, Eugene, 68, 511
Chen, Percy, 295
Chiang Kai-shek, 250
Chinese, refugees in Moscow, 67-68
Chinese, war against, 250-256
Chistka , 173, 174
Chocolate , 405

Christian Science Monitor , 350, 426,
59i

Chumandrin, 494
Cities, migration to, 274
Class struggle, 6, 205

“Cleansing” of the Party, 173, 175
Cobb, Irvin S., 403
Collections, forced, 362, 489, 49°
Collectivization of the peasants, 199,
241, 242, 279-292, 322, 324
“Combinations,” 483
Comintern. See Communist Interna-
tional

Commissariat for Internal Affairs, 637
“Commission shops,” 175
Communism: American, 40-45, 15 3'
154, 401-403, 634-636; German,

394, 548-550; international, 152-
1 56, 633; Italian, 22-28
Communist International (Comintern),
152-156, 549)

Communist Manifesto , 6
Communist Party, 151, * 73 > 3 88 3
congress, 338, 341-3445 purge, 544;
sacrosanct, 204
Communist Youth, 173
“Competition, socialist,” 209
Comsomol. See Communist Youth
Confiscations, 362, 489, 490
Conformity, enforced, 468
Conservatism, Soviet, 639-641
Constitution, U.S.S.R., new, 515
Construction, 557
Contrasts, 295

Correspondents, press, 96, 107-108,

335-34°) 465-466, 582, 584, 591,
640, 644

Corruption, official, 192-195
Cosmopolitan Magazine , 403, 404, 405,
610

Cost of living, 199-200
“Counter-revolutionaries,” executions,
356-359

Counts, George Sylvester, 333
Court procedure, 119
Crime, political and other, 1 91-195
Criticism, justification for, 291-292
Crop failure, 148
Culture, 465-473
Cummings, E. E., 418, 609
Currency, inflation, 271, 363
Cushny, 568, 571

Daily Forward , New York, 463
Daily News , Chicago, 425, 546 (See
also Farson, N.; Wood, J. B.)

INDEX

Daily News, Moscow, 296, 331, 332,
35S, 510, 511, 607, 621
Daily Worker , New York, 42, 526,
624

Darroch, Lola. See Moore, Mrs. Fred
Daughters of the American Revolu-
tion, 401

Day, Donald, 391
“Demands,” synthetic, 178
De Mille, Cecil B., 501, 502
Demonstration trial, 1 14-133
Demonstrations, popular, 103
Depression, economic, 249, 287, 399,
558-559

Deuss, Edward, 96, 243
Deuss, Harriet, 243
Dewey, John, 333, 585
Dialectic materialism, 423
Dinamov, Sergei, m, 246, 333, 495
Directors, shortage of, 483
Disfranchisement, 175
Disfatch, Erie, 12
Dnieprostroi, 492, 542-544
Doletzky, Jacob, 41, 44, 75, 638
Dom N ochlyega, 183-186
Dostoievsky, Feodor Mikhailovich, 458
Doubt, 263-303
Dreiser, Theodore, 403
“Dumping” of goods, 365
Durant, Kenneth, 40-41, 44, 45, 46,
47, 48, 231

Duranty, Walter, 67, 82, 96, 214, 502,
519, 522, 562, 578, 579, 580, 626
Dzherzhinsky, 263
Dzugashvili, Joseph, See Stalin, J.

Eastman, Max, 246
Eckener, Hugo, 222
“Economic vacuum,” 149
Education. See Schools
Educational Alliance, New York, 3, 8
Eimiy 418

Eisenstein, Serge M., 162
“Elections,” factory, 189-191
Emigration, ban on, 523-524
Emigres, 233-234
Englishmen, trial, 561-571, 581
“Equality,” abandoned, 419-423
Escape from U.S.S.R., 471-472
Esmail, Prince, 536
Ethiopia, 647
Ettore-Giovanniti case, 14

651

Europe, 610-617* moral and economic
collapse, 621

Evans, Mrs. Elizabeth Glendower, 29,
3 °> 35

Evans, Ernestine, 48
Everett, Washington, case, 14
Executions, 241, 242, 356-359, 492-
493, 560, 637-638
Exile, 545 - 547 ) 55 °~ 55 i
Existence, tension of, 258
Export of human beings, 453-454

Factories, “elections,” 189-191* spoil-
age, 287

Families, punished for absent head,
432-433

Famine, 97-99, 177-182, 480, 485-
493 > 547 > 572-58o
F arewell to U.S.S.R., 600-609
Farming, private, 485
Farson, Negley, 170, 171, 251
Fascism, 21-27, 156, 395
“Fascism, social,” 156, 205
Favor, official, 581
Fear, 544

Federated Press, 21, 544
Fedotov, Alexander, 378
Felicani, Alicando, 33
Feng Hu-Siang, 250
Films, Soviet, 298-301
Financial America , 12, 21
Fischer, Louis, 54, 55, 74, 75 ) 257,
424 ) 425 ) 519

Five-Year Plan (Fiatiletka) , 93, 133,
147-156, 167, 168, 196-211, 240-
249 ) 3 ^ 7 ) 377 ) 413 - 427 ) 474 ) 54 °)
552-560

Five-Year Plan, Second, 481, 553, 558-
560

Fleming, John, 570
Fleming, Peter, 570
Flights, round-world, 220
Florinsky, Dmitri, 160
Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 10, 12, 13
Food, exports, 180* shortage, 97-99,
177-182, 480, 485 - 493 ) 541-542,
547) 572-580
Forced labor, 424
Ford, James W., 78
“Fordization,” 63
Forebodings, 581-590
Foreign opinion of U.S.S.R., 93-96

INDEX

652

Foreigners in U.S.S.R., 62-63, 68-69,
91-92, 180, 181, 268-277, 328-3405
suspicion of, 173

Foroughi, Mohammed Khan, 534, 535,

536 , 537
Foushman, 73-75
France, 617
Franco, Francisco, 632
Frank, Waldo, 501
Freeman, Joseph, 4G 47
Freeman , The, 28
Freiheit , New York, 160
Friends of Soviet Russia, 38, 328, 331,
59 G 6 34

Fuller, Alvan Tufts, 45, 46
Future and present, 203, 2x5

G.P.U., 58, 424, 426, 583, 597 ) 6o °)
601, 628, 637, 6385 women of, 239
Galen, General. See Bluecher
Gamarnik, Vice Commissar, 638
Gavruchenko, 126
Genie. See Lyons, Eugenie
Germans in U.S.S.R., 272-274
Germany, 394, 547-550, 612-613,

647

Georgia (U.S.S.R.), 359, 390
God Save the Tsar! 450
Gold, Michael, 333
Goldman, Emma, 38
Gordon, Hilary, 405
Gordon, Leon, 405

Gorky, Maxim, 111, 183, 374, 497-
499

Gosflan , 198, 199, 37 7, 378
Grain shortage, 97-99
Grand Hotel, Moscow, 267, 451
Gregory, A. W., 565, 567, 571
Groman, Vladimir, 369
Gropper, William, 58
Gruzd, Grisha, 222-225
Guardian , Manchester, 543, 563

Hall, John, 15, 17-18
Hallelujah , 214, 277, 287, 451
Halliburton, Richard, 5 33
Hammer, Doctor, 251, 296, 510, 5115
family, 67; palace, 296-298, 417
HarfeFs, 6 32

Hart, Charles D., 533, 538
Haywood, William, 15, 76, 77

Hearst organization. See International
News

Hecker, Doctor Alcan, 503, 504
Hell in New Jersey , 42
Herald, Paris, 27

Herald Tribune , New York, 402, 463,
546 , 573

Herriot, Edouard, 516
Hibben, Paxton, 218
High, Stanley, 504

Hindus, Maurice, 337, 502, 573, 5 79
Hitler, Adolf, 156, 176, 334, 3945
425, 431, 547 - 550 , 632, 643
Hoarding, 364, 365
Hoover, Herbert, 149
Horrors of the revolution, 470-473
Horthy, Nicholas, 25
Hospitals, 436-440
Housing problem, 504-518
Howard, Jack, 434
Howard, Roy W., 2 57, 258
Human beings, export of, 453-454
Humanitarianism, 646-648 5 repudia-
tion of, 621

Humor on food-ration subjects, 180-
181

Hungary, 25
Hunt, Frazier, 258
Hymns, Socialist, 7

1 Sfeak for the Silent, 225, 459
I.W.W. See Industrial Workers of the
World

Iberian Virgin, shrine of, 243-244
Ibrahimov, Veli, 194
Idealism, adventure in, 637-648
Ilf, Ilya, 305, 405
Imineetov, 123, 130
Individual, existence in U.S.S.R., 645
indifference to, 6215 initiative, 4825
value of, 646-648

Industrial Workers of the World
(LW.W.), 765 Monthly, 19
Industrialism, forced, 47S-481
Industrialists, talk to, 407
Industrialization, 200-201, 236, 240-
249 ) 553-554
Industry, unbalanced, 422
Inflation, currency, 271, 363
Informers, 362
Initiative, individual, 482
Innitzer, Cardinal, 577

INDEX

653

Intellectual life, depressed, 46 8
Intellectuals, accused, 346-348
Intelligentsia, 133

International (hymn), 95, 214, 313,
321, 642

International, Communist. See Com-
munist International
International News Service, 221, 258,
3 3 5 > 561

Intourist, 329, 349, 454
“Iron Age,” 147-156, 196-211
It CanH Happen Here , 339
Italia (dirigible), 136-139
Italy, 61 6 j expulsion from, 26-27}
fascism, 395} uprising, 21-28
Ivanov, Peter, 372
Ivanov and Petrov, 594-599
Izvestia , 106, 109, 324, 491, 498, 529

Japanese, trouble with, 592-596
Jean Christophe , 617
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 305
Jews, 151, 305 , 353 ) 454 ) 457-458,
461, 5155 anti-Semites, trial of, 186-
1893 Biro-Bidjan, 638} German,

613

Jmudskaya, Miss, 47, 55, 56, 58, 74,
107, 216, 221, 293, 294, 295
Jokes, political, 157-158
Jones, Gareth, 575
Journal of Foreign Literature , in
Journalists’ Club, Moscow, 232
Journalist} tour of European Russia,
349-361 ( See also Correspondents}
Newspapers} Reporting)

Journey through U.S.S.R., 134-146

“Kabuki,” 193

Kaganovich, Lazar, 344, 416, 498,
578, 642

Kalinikov, Ivan, 378
Kalinin, Mikhail I, 54, 56, 57, 108,
149, 160, 165, 199, 345, 475 , 543 ,
588

Kalishnik, 505, 506
Kamenev, Leonid, 150, 338, 345, 370,
568, 637

Karakhan, L. M., 252
Katayama, Sen, 304
Katayev, Valentine, 405
Kazakstan, 306-310, 574
Keen, Ed. L., 293, 294, 295, 598

Khenkin, Vladimir, 346
Khovstchinsky, Georgi N., 217
Khvesin, Midson S., 353
Kirov, Sergei, 344, 345, 497,’ 518,

. 588> 637

Kirshon, Vladimir, 300, 495
Kitchin, George, 425, 426
Klyasma, 503

Kolkhozes. See Collectivization
Kolodoob brothers, 124, 126-127
Koltzov, Mikhail, in
KomancLirovkaSy 232
Kombinatsyay 483
Kondratiev, 369
Kossior, Stanislaw V., 344, 345
Krasnaya Gazetta } 112
Krasnaya Nov y , m
Krassin ( ice-breaker) , 136-139
Krieger, Charles, 13-20
Krylenko, Nikolai, 116, 117, 118, 119,
120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 129,

37 2 , 374 , 375 , 377 , 5*8
Krynin, Professor, 432-433
Kuban, 545 - 547 , 55 0-551
Kubishev, Valerian, 167
Kuh, Fred, 546

Kulaks, 96, 98, 99, 100, 148, 150,
176, 178, 241, 242, 243, 254, 275-
276, 278-292, 318-319, 415, 44 2
Kuprianov, Sergei, 373
Kutusov, 349
Kutusova, Anna, 566
Kuznetsov case, 1 91-192

Labor. See Workers
Language, Russian, 215-216
Largo Caballero, 616
Larichev, Victor, 378
Larkin, Margaret, 46
Larry, story of, 524-528
Leaders, Soviet, 344-346
League of Nations, 615
Lecture tour, 399-401
Left, war on, 173
Lenin, Alexander, 352
Lenin, Nikolai, 44, 47, 54, 81, 98,
128, 150, 151, 152, 188, 190, 206,

263, 266, 285, 290, 320, 321, 341,

342, 343, 344) 345 ) 346 , 35 2 ) 3^2,

421, 497, 541, 542, 623, 626, 637,

643

INDEX

654

Lenin, Madame Nikolai, 288
Leningrad, 586-588
Letter of an Old Bolshevik, 518
Lewis, Sinclair, 339, 403
Liberals, American, 406, 625-636
Liberator , 21
Life and Death of Sacco and Vanzetti ,
The, 3^> 4^

Life, human, value of, 205
Lincoln and Stalin, 408
Lishentsi , 175, 176, 179
Literary Gazette, 112, 246, 333, 495
Literature, 244-248, 298, 33 2_ 333:>

494-496; •writers’ congress, 332
Little Golden Calf , The , 305, 405
Litvinov, Ivy, 504

Litvinov, Maxim, 1 67, 254, 345,

43L 499j 593> 595j 59 ^ 597> 599s
606

Livadia, 360

Livestock, failure to breed, 487; kill-
ing of, 288-289
Living, cost of, 199-200
Living space, 504-518
Livorno Congress, 22-28
Lodging house, Dom Nochlyega , 183-
186

Lokal Anzeiger , Berlin, 337
London, Jack, 418
London, Joan, 418
London, Meyer, 6, 9
Long, Ray, 403, 404, 405, 406
Lothian, Lord, 428
Lovestone, Jay, 153
Lowe, Caroline, 17, 18
Lumber camp investigation, 366
Lunacharsky, Anatole, r6i, 345
Lunacharsky, Madame Anatole, 160
Lussu, Emilio, 43 1
Lux Hotel, 69, 70, 71
Lvovich, Isaak, 517
Lyons, Mrs. Eugene (Billy), 7, n, 27,
29, 48, 60, 69, 70, 72, 79, 86, 134,
171, 172, 180, 212, 216, 228, 229,

247 ? 2 55) 2 58 , 277, 297, 298, 305,

310, 319, 325, 334, 3895 39 2 ) 39<>5

405, 43^5 437-440, 449) 470, 500,

5oi, 530, 531, 570, 579, 5 86, 593,

602, 628

Lyons, Eugenie, 66, 79, 80, 90, 212,
*56, 334, 393, 503, 5^5) 5^6

MacDonald, W. H., 564, 565, 567,
57i

Mahogany , 245

Mainsprings of Russia , T/ztf, 470
Malamuth, Charles, 350, 353, 3 ^ 3 ,
3^6, 387, 388, 390, 392, 404, 418,
419

Manchuria, war in, 250-260
Manifesto, Comintern, 155, 156
Mann, Thomas, 633
Margolin, L. S., 354
Marx, Karl, 6, 320, 626
Materialism, 646-648
Materialism, dialectic, 423
Matson, Norman, 21, 23, 2 5, 396
May Day, 10, 102

Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 60, 247, 301-

303

McCormick, Anne O’Hare, 579
Medicine in U.S.S.R., 436-440
Mensheviks, trial, 379
Metropole Hotel, 451-453
Metropolitan-Vickers Company trial,
561-571

Miller, Webb, 186, 396, 597
Minsk, 186-187
Mironov, 57, 561, 562
Molotov, Vyacheslav, 166, 294, 345,
369, 458) 554

Money. See Currency; Valuta
Monkhouse, Allan, 562, 563, 565, 566,
5<57> 57i

Mookin, 128-129

Moore, Fred H., 13-20, 22, 26, 32, 33,
34? 35) 4i

Moore, Mrs. Fred H. (Lola Darroch),

Morgan, J. P., 13
Morgan, Tom, 407
Morrow, Dwight W., 563
Moscow, accent of, 212-225; foreign-
ers in, 91-92; housing problem, 87-
89; in 1928, 58-60; soul of, 604
Moscow Art Theater, 161
Moscow Carrousel , 630, 632
Moscow Daily News. See Daily News ,
Moscow

Moss, Flint, 15, 18
Moving pictures. See Films
Muggeridge, Malcolm, 339, 542
Musa, 534, 536
Mushrooms, culture of, 486

INDEX

Music, 244, 252

Mussolini, Benito, 22, 393, 431, 622,
632, 643

Nation, The , 27, 526, 636
Nationalism, 139, 345-346
Naturalization, 521-522
Nazis, 46, 394

Negroes in U.S.S.R., 77-79, 508-509
Nekrasoff, 116-1x7
Nep. See New Economic Policy
Nepmen, 84-87, 88, 98, 100, 174, 282,
286

Neue Freie Presse , Vienna, 336
Neumann, Heinz, 72
New Economic Policy, 81-92, 98
New Masses, The , 42, 402, 4x5, 526
New Republic, The, 303, 526, 628,
631

Newspapers, 105-107, 1915 conceal

famine, 572-5805 reporting*, 397-
398 ( See also Correspondents 5 Re-
porting 1 , and names of papers)

New Year’s celebration, 1930, 276-278

Nijni-Novgorod, 351, 499

Nikolaiev, 518

Nobles’ Club, 569

Nomad, Max (Max Podolsky), 39

Nordwall, 568, 571

Novgorod, 443

O’Connor, Harvey, 510
Odessa, 144
Ogoniok, 325, 510
Old Bolsheviks, annihilation of, 637
“Only Russians,” 580
Opposition, Communist, 98, 100, 284-
285, 548

Ordzhonikidze, Gregory, 447, 543
Orthodox Church, 355
Osadchi, P. S., 377

Ossipovna, Rachelle, 62, 77, 79, 254,
255 ) 436-43 7

Ostracism in New York, 230-232
Ottinger, Albert, 229, 230, 406
Ovey, Sir Esmond, 562

Panteleyevs, 504, 505, 506, 507
Parades, 103, 608-609
Parilka. See Torture
Parties, diplomats’, 159
“Parties” in Moscow, 71, 72

655

Party, Communist. See Communist
Party

Passaic, New Jersey, strike, 42
Passivity, Russian, 450
Passports, internal, revival of, 5 15-5 17
Pava, 60, 247
Pavlov, I. P., 2x8-219, 586
Peasants, 440-4445 conquest of, 279-
2925 flight of, 274
“Pent-house Bolsheviks,” 635
Perelom . See “Break,” Great
Persian entr’acte, 531-539
Personal History , 67
Peter I, 469

Peter the Great, 469, 470
Petliura, Hetman, 218
Petrov, Eugene, 305, 405, 602
Petrov and Ivanov, 594-599
Petrova, story of, 471-472
Pew case, 13-20
Piatiletka. See Five-Year Plan
Piatakov, George Leonid, 150, 370,
56 8, 637

Piece-work wages, 419
Pilnyak, Boris Andreyevich, 245-248,
403, 404, 440-444
Planned chaos, 482-493
Podolsky, Jacob, 57, no, 336, 596
Podolsky, Max (Max Nomad), 39
Pokrovsky, M. B., 219
Poland, 61 1-6x2
Policy, Soviet, reversal, 419-423
Politburo, 149-345, 348, 388
Politotdyels , 577, 578
Post, N. Y., 404
Posterity, work for, 203
Poverty, 413

Pravda, 106, 140, 149, i94> 3 22 > 34^>
49 1 , 49 8 ) 54i) 582, 642
Preobrazhensky, 43, 150
Present and future, 203, 215
Press. See Newspapers
Press department, Soviet, 56, 252, 253
Prisoners, torture of, 455-464
Prohme, Rayna, 67
Proletarians, “real,” 324-327
Pur fie Island , The, 163
Pushkin, Alexander, 84
Putna, General, 638

Queues (bread lines), 361

INDEX

656

Rabbits, culture of, 4.85
Rabinovich, 12 7- 12 9, 131
Races in U.S.S.R., 352
Rachelle. See Ossipovna, Rachelle
Radamsky, Sergei, 162, 163
Radek, Karl, 45, 150, 287, 335, 345,
568, 585, 641

Radicalism, American, 5, 12-13, 625-
6365 post-war treatment, 10 5 split,
37

Railroad accidents, 365
Ramzin, Leonid, 369, 370, 373, 374,
376 , 377 ) 378 , 379 ) 380
Rand School, 10, 19
Ransom system, 453-454
RAPP, 245-246, 302, 332, 404; end
of, 494-502
Rasstrel, 362-369
Rationing of food, 177-182
“Real” Russia, search for, 320-327
Rebels and Renegades , 39
Recall from Moscow, 591-599
Red Square, Moscow, 321
Red tape, in hospital, 438-440
Reed, John, 21, 500, 501
Religion in U.S.S.R., 1 01-102 5 war
against, 242-244, 282, 286, 294
Reporting, 3 9 7-3 9 8
Residence, fixed by passport system,
515-5X7

Resistance, passive, 491
Reuters, 251, 570, 571
Revolution, effects of, 2025 horrors
of, 470-473 j ideals, 606
Revolutionist, professional, 43-44
Riazantsev, Professor, 357
Richardson, Stanley, 588
Rightism, 152
Riutin, 517

Riza Shah Pahlevi, 531, 533, 534, 53 5 >
536> 537J 53 8
Road to Exile , 431
Rolland, Romain, 617-621, 625, 629,
63 1

Romm, Vladimir, 638
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 588, 592, 595
Rosta. See Tass
Rostov, 354

Rothstein, Theodore, 56, 57, no, 252,
253

Rulers, Soviet, cleavage among, 284-
285

Russia, former, 5875 revolution, 8-9,
i3) 25, 3 7 #

Russian-Americans, 521-530
Russians, 603-605
“Russians, only,” 580
Russia's Iron Age, 579
Ryazanov, 219

Rykov, Alexei, 54, 98, 166, 294, 341,
343 - 344 ) 345 > 352, 368, 369

Sabbath, nationalization, 210
Sabotage, iooj charge, 346-3475 trials,
1 1 4“ I 33) 370-380
“Saboteurs,” executions, 356-359
Sacco-Vanzetti case, 13, 14, 22, 24,
26, 28-36, 41, 42, 45, 46
“Sacrifice,” 477-479
St. John, Vincent, 12
Samarkand, 3x4, 315
Scheffer, Paul, 82, 336
Schools, 256, 333 - 334 ) 4^8, 585
Scientific research, 586
Seldes, Gilbert, 162
Selmashstroi, 355
Semionovich, Pavel, 482
Serebriakov, Leonid B., 73, 370, 637
Shakhty trial, 1 14-133
Shatoff, Bill, 309, 310, 311, 3x2
Shaw, George Bernard, 428-435
Sheean, Vincent, 67, 68
Shirokikh, Nathalie Petrovna, 295
“Shock brigades,” 208-210
Shura, 417, 418, 500, 510, 607, 609
Shvernik, 207
Silver Forests, 254, 255
Sitnin, Xenophon, 373
Six Soviet Elays , 237
Skakhtin, Kyril, 127
Skepticism, 346-347, 474-481
Skorutto, 124-126
Slag, social, 183-195
Slashchev, Jacob, 218
Sled, motor, 445-446
Slocombe, George, 258
Smirnov, Alexander, 370, 637
Smolar, Boris, 305
Social-Democratic parties, 156
“Social fascism,” 156, 205
Socialism, 5-6, 622-623
“Socialism,” revised, 413-4275 Soviet,
605

“Socialist” competition, 209

INDEX

657

Society of Old Bolsheviks, 583
Songs, Soviet, 2 12-2 13
Soviet decennial, 47-48
Soviet leaders, 39

Soviet Russia Pictorial , 37, 38, 53
Soviet schism, 44
Spain, 616, 632, 647
“Speculators.” See Nepmen
Spewack, Samuel, 33
Spies, 362

Spirituals, Negro, 162, 163
Spokane, Washington, free-speech fight,
*4

Spring in U.S.S.R., 100-101
Stalin, Josef, 39, 42, 43, 44, 54, 71,
72, 82, 85, 98, 100, 102, 145, 147,
149, 150, 152, 153, 156, 158, 162,
166-172, 178, 179, 190, 198, 200,
201, 204-206, 258-259? 263-267,

276, 278, 279, 282, 283, 285-287,
289-291, 308, 320, 321, 337, 338,
341-346, 359, 381-392, 407, 408,
421-423, 468, 469, 477, 482, 494-
499 ? 515 ? 5 ^ 8 - 530 ? 533 ? 53 ^? 538 ?
542, 554? 556, 557 ? 559 ? 56o, 573,
582, 585, 608, 622, 637, 638, 640,
641-644

Stalin, Josef, adulation, 641-644; as-
sassination rumors, 381; attempted
interview with, 263; birthday, 2 66-
267; description, 385; interview
with, 381-392
Stalingrad, 353
Stallings, Laurence, 580
Stanislavsky, Vladimir, 161
Stern, Judas, 568
Stimson, Henry L., 253, 408, 624
Stoneman, William, 425, 546
Strang, William, 565, 566
Strong, Anna Louise, 283, 337, 510,
511

Summer in U.S.S.R., 134
Sun Yat Sen, Madame, 68
Sunday, nationalization, 210

Tageblatt , Berliner, 336
Tamerlane, 315
Tarasov-Rodionov, 405
Tartars, 352-353
Tashkent, 3 12-3 13

Tass (Rosta), 37, 4°? 4-2? 44“47? 6 9?

75? in? 159? 220, 251, 252, 336,

398, 63 5

Tchernavin, Vladimir V., 225, 425,
426, 459

Technicians, foreign, in U.S.S.R., 234-
239

Telegram , Boston, 36
Terror, reign of, 547
Thayer, Judge Webster, 32, 36
Theater, 63-64, 244
Thomas, Norman, 9
Thornton, Leslie, 564-567, 571
Tiflis, 359

Times, New York, 30, 67, 111, 214,
254, 290, 335, 338, 359, 402, 541,
572 - 574 ? 580
Timur Tash, 535
Tolstoi, Alexandra Lvovna, 161
Tolstoi, Alexei, 405, 469, 587
Tolstoi, Leo, 161, 352
Tomsky, Mikhail, 98, 207, 338-340,
34 i? 343 ? 344 ? 638
Torgsin, 447~45°

Torture of prisoners, 455-464
Tour of European Russia by journal-
ists, 349-361

Tourists in U.S.S.R., 101, 226-239,
349 ? 434-435

Tragedies, American, 519-53°
Transportation, 445, 556
Travel, restriction on, 515-517
Tresca, Carlo, 12, 21
Trial, demonstration, 1 14-133; of
Mensheviks, 379; of “wreckers,”
370-380

Trivas, Sergei, 62, 94, 171, 172, 293
Trotsky, Leon D., 42, 43, 44? 47 ? 7°?
81, 83, 98, 150, 151, 152, 156, 158,
168-172, 178, 181, 263, 3x2, 338,
34 i? 345 ? 382

Trotskyists, 172, 178, 200, 364, 638
Troyanovsky, Alexander, 593
Tukhachevsky, Mikhail N., 160, 370,
568, 638

Tulsa dynamiting case, 13-20
Tulsa : a Study in Oil, 19
Tunney, Gene, 418
Turkestan-Siberian Railroad, 308
Turnover, labor. See Workers
Tverskaya, Moscow, 83-84
Tyrannies, tour of, 610-623

INDEX

658

Tzik. See Central Executive Commit-
tee

U darniki , 208-210
“Undesirables,” 516
Uglanov, Nikolai, 341
Ulrich, Vasily, 568

Umansky, Constantine, 41, 69, 72, 416,
466, 545, 551, 562, 563, 575, 576,
581, 582, 593, 597, 606
Union of Soviet Writers, 494
United Press, 46, 221, 222, 257, 264,
293, 294, 29 335, 397, 39 8 , 407,
429, 434, 511, 514, 531, 547, 551,
570, 596-598, 613

United States, 624-6255 relations with,
588, 592, 595
TJra<vnilo c ojka , 421
Uzbekistan, 3 1 3-3 1 5

“Vacuum, economic,” 149
Valuta, 447-450 j arrests, 4x5
Vanzetti case. See Sacco-Vanzetti
Variety , 162, 298
V erblyud , 354

Verslin, Nossa-Baer, 352-353
Vienna, 613-615

Vishinsky, Andrei Y., xi6, 119, 131,
567

VOKS, 404

Volga Flow to tlte Caspian Sea ,

246, 404

“Volga pirates” case, 1 91-192
Voroshilov, Klementi, 149, 160, 382,
387, 388, 409
Vorovsky, Ambassador, 25

Wages, nominal and real, 476
Waifs (B ezfrizorny) , 281
War against Chinese, 250-256
War, class, 205

Washington Merry-Go-Round , 350

Weather, Moscow, 157
Webbs, Sidney and Beatrice, 284, 326,
43 1 , 49*, 515, 54i, 631
Wells, Herbert George, 390
Wells, Linton, 561, 588
Wichita, Kansas, I.W.W. case, 14
Williams, Albert Rhys, 350, 355, 3 56,
500

Williams, Spencer, 504
Winter in Moscow, 164
Winter in Moscow , 339, 543
Witkin, Zara, 514, 528-530, 554, 597,
610, 613, 617, 618
Wolfe, Bertram, 153
Wolff news agency, 251
Woll, Matthew, 13
Women of the G.P.U., 239
Wood, Junius B., 66, 96, 170, 391
Workers: labor, cheap, 2915 forced,
366, 424, 425; turnover, 4225 sup-
pression of former rights, 422
Workers’ Defense Union, xo, 13
Workers* Gazette , 162
Workmen’s Circle, 6
World y New York, 33
“Wreckers.” See Sabotage
Writers. See Literature

Yagoda, Henry, 193, 407

Yakir, I. E., 370, 638

Yaponyets, Mishka, 144

Yermakovka, 183-186

Yessenin, Sergei, 301

Yonov, i2, 61, 62

Young People’s Socialist League, 7

Zemlya i Fabrika , 112
Zeppelin, round-world flight, 221-225
Zinoviev, Gregory, 43, 45, 62, 150,
263, 338, 345, 370, 568, 637, 641
Zurich, 615
Zweig, Stefan, 161

UNIVERSAL

UNIVERSAL

LIBRARY